Gravity
by faithunbreakable
Summary: Jim Kirk is a planet unto himself, orbited by the debris of countless lives. Anthology. Language warning.
1. elevator music

Disclaimer: I do not own Star Trek or anyone in it. Pity.

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_Jim knows a bit about hating people. Words: 1350; Title: Tori Amos_

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**elevator music (the way we fight)**

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Hating Frank is pretty much a given. The man breezes into Jim's life when he's three and sets up shop permanently when he's five, demanding to be paid respect because he's the man in the house now. Nevermind that the house they live in, the car he drives and the woman he fucks all belong to another man.

A dead man.

And that man's name is George Kirk and he's Jim father and hating the usurper is almost his duty – he knows all about duty, grows up on tales of it, tales of his great father and the way he went beyond his duty and saved eight hundred people and even if Pike looks at him like he's stupid, he knows the exact number, thanks anyway, knows it by heart. Eight hundred and seventeen people. Including his mother. Including him.

So he hates Frank because it's his duty and it's not like the man makes it hard. He marries Winona, loves Winona – or maybe the prestige and titles and infamy she brings to rural fucking Iowa – but Sam and Jim are unwelcome tag-alongs. Like buying a dog and getting the fleas for free.

Only fleas went extinct in the late twenty first century and Sam and Jim are here, are alive and loud and children. Who might be damn self sufficient when it comes right down to it, but still children. With a mother who loves the stars more than them, who drops them at Frank's door – their father's door, their father's whole damn house – four weeks after the wedding and doesn't come back for nine months.

Frank has no idea how to deal with them, doesn't want to learn and lets them feel it. Sam's reaction is to go into teenage rebellion several years too early and Jim, still young and bright-eyed and unable to fully comprehend, tries to please Frank, tries so hard. And is shot down every single time.

So yeah, he fucking hates Frank as soon as he is old enough to understand what that means, to put a name to the burning, aching hotness in his chest that wants to jump from his ribcage and tear into something.

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A lot of the time, he hates his mother, too. This hate is different, sure it is, not the bright, glowing flame he holds in his heart of hearts for Frank – may the bastard fucking burn – but a softer thing, more quiet. Like coke that's been left in the sun for too long and lost all its fizz. Flat. Lifeless.

And how sad is it that he needs soft drink analogies to explain what he feels for his mother – the woman who gave birth to him?

But that's the problem, isn't it? Winona Kirk gave birth to him. And that's it. End of story. Over, amen, out. She gave birth to him and clung to him for a week until they were rescued from the shuttle and brought back to Earth and there she put him in her own mother's arms and crumpled to the floor in great heaving sobs.

He knows. He's been told often enough. It's meant as an encouragement, that story, an example of the great epic love his parents shared. All it is to him, all it shows him, is that his mother loved George more than either of his sons.

Why else would she be up there, in the stars all the time, if not to chase a dead man's ghost across the black? Why else would she drop his sons at the feet of a man who neither cares for nor wants them? Why else would she run so very hard from them?

When he's small he believes the stories of mommy saving worlds and peoples. But then he gets older and he learns the meaning of the word escapist and from that moment on, that's what Winona becomes in his mind. An escapist of reality and responsibility who would rather die on some backwater planet than watch her children grow up.

Oh, she comes home, yeah, sure, and she brings them presents. Books and trinkets, things you'd expect from a distant aunt. And she takes them on great adventures, movies and amusement parks and whatever the hell she can come up with, trying to make up with material things what she lacks emotionally.

All Sam wants, all Jim ever wants is a _mom _but she's deaf to that particular plea.

Frank's sin is not wanting to raise the spawn of a dead man whose shadow hangs over every damn thing in his life.

Winona's sin is clinging to that very same shadow with mad desperation and destroying the real things, the solid, living breathing remains of her husband in the process. Her sin is leaving her sons on Earth with Frank, who hates them right back.

So Jim hates his mother, too, hates her for all she didn't do for him and all the chances and good things she took away from him by fucking up his life from the very moment she put him in his grandmother's arms and sunk to the ground.

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But most of all, fucking most of all of his messed up, useless parental figures, Jim hates his father, noble, wonderful, brilliant, self sacrificing George Kirk.

Who was suicidal and dumb and brave and who died and caused all this shit. He broke Winona's heart, he made Frank look upon two innocent boys and see only problems, only unwelcome things, he made Sam look at Jim like he was a poor replacement, and he makes Jim spend his life under the weight of two simple words.

_Your father._

Never George, never Sam's father, always his. Your father died for you. Your father was a hero. Your father would be disappointed in you. Your father was better, faster, stronger, smarter, nobler, fucking anything and everything.

Your father was a god and you are the shriveled, sobbing, screaming little bundle of spit and shit we got in return for his great sacrifice.

His father loved Jim. He knows that. He died for him. That's a fact.

But there are also other facts, facts that everyone else seems to forget:

His father never hears him say his first word. He never sees him take his first step, never teaches him how to punch, never defends him from bullies and Frank and never tells him how to talk to girls. He is never there, he never kisses Winona like he should, he never pats Jim on the shoulder or hugs him or tells him he's proud and when other people tell him George would be – proud that is – it sets his teeth on edge every damn time because he's not.

George isn't anything because George is dead.

And that's the one truth that everyone else seems to forget. George, his father, is dead. His atoms are scattered across space along with the debris of the ship that went up in flames with him.

He's not here.

He's never here.

Frank is here and he feeds Jim, clothes him and sometimes, albeit reluctantly, he even pats Jim on the head like a dog that did a cool new trick. Winona comes and goes but she's there, too, occasionally and always on Christmas. If she can swing it.

But his father is not.

Jim grows up and grows old in the span of twenty years, he fucks up his life and somehow manages to straighten it out and saves the entire planet and his father's. Not. Here.

And for that Jim hates him with all the desperate, wild irrationality of a child that spent countless hours of his fucked up youth lying on the floor of his dingy room, wishing for someone to come and take him away.

No-one ever did and eventually Jim packed a single back pack and took himself away, just started walking like Sam had almost six years earlier and he never looked back.

At least that's what he tells himself.

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	2. I need a place to sleep

I turned 'Cupcake', singular, into 'cupcakes', plural. Just go with it.

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_How Leonard becomes Bones and doesn't mind too much at all. Words: 1200; Title: Black Lab_

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**I need a place to sleep**

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He enters the shuttle with dread but as soon as he takes his first look around, that dread turns into the irrepressible desire to run head first into a hard surface and knock himself out. Children. All around him sit red-clad, blue-eyed naïve little children that dream of discovering the universe and saving the world. Never mind contracting alien viruses, getting blown up, eaten, spaced, kidnapped and experimented on or just flat out shot in the head.

The excitement and purpose and sheer jittery happiness is stifling for Leonard, who spent the last week - since signing the divorce papers, actually - on a bender that would have a lesser man in a coma by now. He's here because his life has turned to shit and all that's left to his name is his title of Doctor and the clothes on his back. Well that, and a spanking new contract that basically says Starfleet owns his soul. Period.

These kids are here because they want to start their lives. He's here because his just ended. It's gonna be a smashing four years. He can already see it: He, angry, sarcastic and hung over, surrounded by cadets bustling with energy and jumping like a toddlers after too much sugar, trying to get him to reconnect with his inner child.

He's pretty sure his inner child is dead from alcohol poisoning at this point, thanks anyway.

He hides in the bathroom – ha, ha, _bathroom,_ more like a metal can inside a bigger metal can with a hole in the floor – and gets dragged out by a tiny nazi woman. He barks something at her about fear of flying and big words but she's unimpressed and points him to the last empty seat next to the only person on this damn shuttle that's not wearing spanking new red.

Kid's got eyes as blue as Leonard's feeling and the doctor in him immediately notices the swollen jaw and dried blood on his upper lip and shirt. Someone had as great a night as him. Maybe even better.

He sits down, admitting defeat and warns the kid, because he might be the only other sane person in this can, that he might throw up on him.

Blue Eyes looks at him funny for a moment and then completely ignores the warning. During take-off he watches wordlessly and relaxed as Leonard claws for a handhold, visibly freaking out because he means it when he says he absolutely loathes space and anything that can get him there.

For a moment the kid watches him suffer and then he takes a deep breath and starts babbling. It's useless shit about booze and bikes and music and the other cadets – who, for some reason, he insists on calling cupcakes – and Leonard feels something inside of him uncurl as he focuses on that voice and caustic humor.

At the end of the flight, when they are all scrambling off board – some out of eagerness, Leonard just to get off the damn shuttle – he slaps his savior on the back and says, "Thanks, kid."

"Jim," the kid corrects with a grimace, "Name's Jim."

Yeah, he knew that. Probably. They did introduce themselves at one point, he remembers. Still. He shrugs and takes off to get his dorm room – he thought he left those behind for good, good god, what's he doing here again – assigned and hopefully get a few dozen hours of sleep before this hellish thing starts up for real.

Two hours later he stabs the code into the door panel and enters, gaze immediately landing on his new roommate and he sort of gets why Jim calls them cupcakes. There's something undeniably square and clean cut, cookie cutter simple and annoying about them. If he were a poetic man, he'd say these cadet drones lack creativity, lack a spark. A soul. They have bought into the Starfleet recruitment shit hook, line and sinker and they'll never see far enough, never reach high enough to realize it's all a crock of shit like Leonard did from the get go and that kid, too.

And what's that say about the two of them that they signed the damn papers despite knowing what they're getting themselves into?

The guy immediately starts droning on about space and schedules and bathroom shifts and Leonard flips him off in a move he's too old for and drops onto the empty bed, falling asleep almost instantly.

He wakes hours later to the sound of someone cursing up a blue streak and then the banging of something heavy hitting the door. He cracks open one eye to see the butt end of his cupcake roommate stomp out, bag over his shoulder, boxes piled in his arms. Moving out? Leonard didn't think he snored that badly.

He rolls that one open eye to the other – now free again – bed and finds, to his complete lack of surprise, Jim Kirk lounging among regulation sheets, PADD propped on his lap, single, ratty backpack discarded on the floor next to muddy boots and a sloppy stack of new uniform shirts and pants.

Leonard grunts and the kid waves, "Hi there, Bones."

Bones? The hell?

"There's been an unfortunate accident with the room assignments. Terrible really. Poor guy back there," he hooks a thumb toward the door, "Got stuck in the wrong room. But everything's fixed now."

Enter razor blade grin. Leonard rolls on his back and runs that statement through his head. Translation, roughly: I hacked into the Starfleet system and reassigned myself as your roomie, hope you don't mind.

Not only disillusioned and a bit crazy, but also smart. And apparently as desperate for some normal, human company as Leonard himself is.

Suddenly Jim jumps, putting the PADD down carelessly on the bed and starts digging through his backpack. Leonard sits up and takes a gander at the discarded computer. It's the Complete Edition of Starfleet Regulations. His eyebrows rise of their own accord. He didn't figure the kid for a stickler for rules.

But Jim catches his look, throws that daredevil grin his way and says, "Regulations are a lot easier to circumvent when you know them."

Ah. Okay then. Then the kid waves something long and white in Leonard's face and he has to pull back to get a proper look at it. It's a spanking new, plastic wrapped toothbrush.

He frowns at the thing and makes no move to take it. Jim, grinning like a loon, flings the thing at him and tells him, "You got booze breath."

"Aw," he coos, as he picks up the present, still sounding like he spent the last week under a table in a grudgy bar, which is pretty much what happened. "Didn't know you cared."

Jim waggles his eyebrows suggestively and sits back down, still in ratty jeans and blood stained t-shirt. "Can't have your carcass stinking up the room, Bones."

That's true love right there, it is and he's absolutely keeping that kid.

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	3. a name that noone knows

Kinda weak and not how I wanted it to be, but it refuses to be cleaned up any more.

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_To Uhura's people, names are a private thing. Words: 1050_

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**a name that no-one knows**

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Uhura grows up in a family that values names more than the rest of the world. They celebrate name days, not birthdays and always have. Names are who you are, what you are. Names hold your secrets and in the old fairy tales her grandmother told her when she was a child, names have magic powers.

Speak a name and you control the thing.

And maybe she's a bit fanciful, a bit dreamy in her youth, but she takes those stories and she runs with them. Her name belongs to her and no-one else. She lets her parents have it because they gave it to her and they would never hurt her, their only child.

She lets her grandmother, that wonderful, strong, fantastical woman have it, because she is the only one that simply smiles at little Ny's strange quirks rather than rolling her eyes indulgently.

Her friends call her Uhura and so do her teachers. She makes sure of that.

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Ten years later, the quirk has become an integral part of her, deeper embedded than any cultural or religious belief. Her name belongs to her only. It is her secret to tell.

Boys play the first-name-game with her long before Kirk tries to hit on her in a ratty bar in backwater Iowa and they lose. Always. Her first name is a distant childhood memory and the one time she tells it, the one boy she trusts enough, breaks up with her two weeks later and it wasn't true love after all.

Never mind.

Spock, for all his damned logic, seems to understand her motives and sentiments because he never uses her name although she is sure he knows it from her file, has looked it up long before he ever gave in to her attempts to coerce him into agreeing to a date.

She tells him after they've been dating for three months and he does that half-bow with his head, a silent thank you for her trust. He never abuses the privilege of having her name and he never uses it to gain power over her. She is Nyota behind closed doors, Uhura everywhere else.

She likes it just fine that way.

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Even Gaila, roommate for three years, doesn't know Nyota. She only knows Uhura. Her grandmother still writes Nyota once a week until she dies. In her very last message she says, _Be careful, child, because a name that no-one knows is a forgotten thing._

Uhura doesn't understand the warning but she still cries and takes a few days off to go to the funeral.

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Kirk is the only one who never gives up. At one point he resorts to rattling off an entire encyclopedia worth of names, starting at A and not stopping until halfway through S, hoping to catch a minute reaction that will betray her.

He's like a little poodle that insists on following her around, barking up her leg like it's a tree. She might tell him why she doesn't tell him if she thought he was serious. But he's just flirting with her because he knows it pisses her off. Jerk.

She steels herself when the Ns roll around and ignores all his pleas and jokes.

He's an immature brat, nothing more, and she has a deep seated respect for McCoy who, for some reason, manages to put up with Kirk for years.

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Then the entire Nero debacle happens and her name slips out but there's no time to be angry about it because Earth is about to be blown to pieces, Spock and Kirk just took off on a suicide mission, leaving them all out of command officers and it's all… when did it all go to hell? Because three days ago her greatest problem was Kirk hiding under Gaila's bed and now he's out there, risking his life and being… being a captain.

Wow.

He gets the Enterprise, just like they all knew he would, after it's over. And he gets to keep McCoy and Sulu and Chekov and her, too, for some reason. The crazy Scot comes along too, and Spock signs himself on and then they are suddenly a crew.

A crew.

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And maybe she never gave Kirk enough credit because after the initial triumphant jokes, he never uses her first name again, calling her Uhura instead.

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They're halfway through their third consecutive shift and all the injured are drugged up and asleep; Chekov and Scotty and Spock have the engines back online and Sulu sits, staring blandly as the autopilot steers them through space. They are all bone tired, worn, exhausted and about to drop where they stand. But the ship still flies, their crew still lives and the enemy is a smudge of dust in space. The won.

Kirk – Jim – stands from his command chair and tries not to let it show how he wobbles a bit, still dizzy from getting flung around during the attack. "Good work, people," he tells them with a smile that's only at a tenth of its usual strength but somehow all the more real for it.

"Guys," he nods at the three that spent the past twenty hours slaving in engineering, "We wouldn't be flying without you. Sulu, nice steering back there." Chuckles. "Bones, great work, great drugs," he gives a drunken grin that the caustic doctor returns with a snort.

Last he turns to the only female member of the command crew and says, "Uhura-"

And for some reason she doesn't quite understand she interrupts him with, "Nyota."

Everyone on the bridge stills, looking at her wide-eyed. She hesitates, steels herself and repeats, slowly, "Nyota."

She might not quite understand, still, what her grandmother was trying to tell her but she knows that if she can let a lover in, if she can let her parents in, then she can let these people in, too, because they are her family.

Even if Kirk will probably make her regret it a hundred times over.

But for now he just smiles and nods and repeats once more, "Great work."

Yes. Yes, it is.

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	4. speak to you

Ya know, if there's anything in particular you would like to see, I'm always open for ideas.

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_This Jim is not his Jim. Warnings: Allusions to child abuse. Words: 720; Title: Tori Amos_

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**speak to you (are you in there)**

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This Jim is not his Jim. Not only because this Jim is barely twenty-five and woefully unprepared for what's coming, no, but also because his insides are all messed up, all different. A twisted shadow, a poetic man would say, a dark maybe of the man Spock has called friend for so many years.

It starts with those blue eyes, blue like Earth summer skies, like glass and lightning. Jim's eyes are not this blue, not any blue at all, but brown like earth and soil and steady things.

Not that either Jim knows now or ever has known, the meaning of the word steady. But here, in this icy cave, sitting across this blue-eyed version of his best friend, there is an edge to the patented Kirk craziness, a serrated, biting edge that the other Jim never had.

And it hurts.

Spock tries to tell himself to separate the two Jims, to sort them into different categories, using their different eyes as markers. Nature has given him this genetic quirk, this accident of miniscule change in the DNA code to tell them apart, to look at an old friend's face and see something different. To keep him from falling too deeply into old patterns.

But it's not working.

So, like he would have once done, he reaches out and pushes into his friend's – not friend's – mind, pushing with information and memory, with facts and figures and feelings. And, as any matter that has pressure exerted on it, Jim's mind bends and reforms, surges past his point of entry and right into his own mind.

What he sees reeling before his mind's eye is Jim T. Kirk, the abridged version and oh, oh, he feels the desire to curl up and cry at what he sees.

George Kirk dead, Winona Kirk broken, Sam a mere shadow in Jim's memory. Bar fights and broken bones, spit lips and nothing but the fierce need to _show these fuckers _keeping a confused and lonely boy together. Bones is there, Uhura is there, the flirting, the mad desire for space and the Enterprise.

But below all that, below those familiar things is an abyss of darkness, a hole as deep as a world.

His Jim was crazy, yes, but underneath that, he was mostly whole, patched together by love, support, and Bones's hyposprays and gruff bedside manner.

This Jim is in pieces, so many pieces and here he is, foolish old man, foolish sentimental half-human, pushing memories of a better time, a better place into this broken mind, twisting it further with what ifs and maybes.

He pulls back as soon as he can, puts distance between them in a useless attempt to give Jim room, to separate himself from what he saw.

The Outpost, Nero, danger. He uses these things to gain distance and during their long hike through the cold, he holds his tongue and tries not to look at those blue, blue eyes. Better this way.

Finding Scotty here, on all possible worlds, is a flicker of light, a welcome distraction. He gives the man his own calculations and sends them off with advice and a farewell, sends them off to save the universe, as it should be – Jim leading, the rest of his crew following, to hell and beyond.

And he hopes, hopes fiercely with every single cell of his mother's heritage, that this Jim is not too broken to one day become his Jim.

Either way, he has no intention of being there to witness. His Jim is dead and it is wrong of him to pin his memories on a boy with blue eyes and a different life.

Perhaps he should have kept his memories of a better world and kept his silence here, on this cold world. Maybe he should have died in ice and let this timeline develop as it may.

But it's too late now. The damage is done and the lines between then and now, between was and could-have-been, is and should-be are painfully smudged and blurred and there is no going back.

This Jim, this blue-eyed child of circumstance, knows how different his life could have been and that's Spock's fault.

It will either make him or break him.

Spock will not be there to watch.

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	5. the kid that falls

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_Winona Kirk regrets many things. Words: 1050; Title: Pink_

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**The kid that falls**

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It's late, almost midnight and Winona is tired. Too tired to move from her perch on the porch stairs, staring at the stars. Tomorrow her leave ends and she'll be back in space before sunset but that doesn't diminish her slow burning longing for the black so far above. She was made for the stars and she's been down here for a month, with her second husband and youngest son.

Sam ran away, Frank told her the day she came back. Some girl, her parents made trouble so they ran off. Winona worries about her oldest but she remembers being young and in love. She hopes Sam is happy.

Jim, on the other hand, seems to harbor no well-wishes toward his brother. For the entire month he has been silently glaring at anything that moves, sullen and mulish in his discontent.

She turns a mug of cold coffee in her hands and tries to convince her tired limbs to carry her to bed. Frank is in town, watching a game with the boys, and he won't be back until the early morning hours. It's just her in the house, tonight, her and the stars. The silence makes her limbs heavy, pulls her under. It's why she likes being with Starfleet. Up there, there is no down time. No silence to fill her with lead.

"Mom?" Jim's voice comes from the darkness that fills the yard, startling her badly. She forgot that he's here, somewhere, roaming about.

He steps out of the shadows of a crippled, twisted tree, little more than a face in the dark. A face that belongs not to him but his dead father. George's blue, blue eyes, his darkly tanned skin and pearly white teeth, his nose, his slanted lips and thick, honey hair. Even the tilt of his head is George. Only Jim's hands are long and slender and different. They are her hands, not her husband's, but at this angle they are invisible.

All Winona sees is George and it becomes harder to look at her son every time she returns from the stars to find him older.

Sam has her eyes, her nose and her smile and looking at him has always been easier because he was here before Jim was born. Before George…

She looks at Jim and thinks that he is a poor replacement for George and that is wrong. She _knows _that. George would have died that day, Jim or no Jim. He would have died because that's who he was and he could never, never stand by while people suffered, while people died. He could save them all so he did but Jim… Jim was born the same minute George died and she can't help but think, somehow… it wasn't a fair trade.

Mothers should not think like that.

But Winona is not much of a mother to her husband's last legacy, his mirror image. She never has been.

And Jim, for all his eleven years, knows that. He stops a good ten feet away from her and suddenly says, "Sam didn't run away because of a girl."

"No?"

"He forgot to buy beer and Frank pushed him down the stairs." Jim's voice is flat, barely breaking, but already hollow. He delivers his statement like they are talking about the weather.

"Why would Frank do that?" Winona notices that she is clutching her mug too tightly and relaxes her grip carefully.

Her son shrugs and ignores her question, eyes on his dirty boots. "He hits us when you're not there. And he says…"

Jim shakes his head and dares sneak a look at her face. She does not know what he sees there, but his answer is a spark of bright, glowing rage at the back of his eyes and he nods, sharply. George did the very same thing when he was angry beyond words.

Winona looks into the depths of her coffee and then at the stars, hoping for her husband to come down and give advice, even after all these years. Should she believe Jim? He is an angry, lonely boy with the weight of his father's name and death on his shoulders. And Frank… Frank is a bit rough around the edges but he is a good man. He loves her. He looks after her boys.

He wouldn't… Would he? If he does, what can she do? Take Jim away? Put him where? Her parents are dead, so are George's. She has no family left to speak of. Nothing but her distant sister, living in a far off colony. She'd have to ask for a transfer, a job on one of the stations.

Away from the stars. Away from George, whose echo she can only hear up there, in the black. She'd have to stay with Jim, who looks like his father but is not, never will be. Jim, who lives as a constant reminder that her husband is dead and he's…

Looking at him gets harder every time she comes here.

She stands, forcing her heavy limbs to obey and closes the distance between herself and her son. She closes her eyes and bends to kiss him on the forehead, inhaling an old, familiar scent.

Jim's only crime is bringing up memories by association and it's not fair of her, treating him like she does. But taking George from her wasn't fair either and she is so very tired. Tired, and lonely, and far from the stars that are the only thing that lets her breathe freely.

She pulls back from her son and runs a hand through his tousled hair. "Go to bed, Jim," she tells him.

He nods again, sharp and angry but also resigned. Maybe he's tired, too. Then he pushes past her into the house without another word. By the time he gets up in the morning, she is already gone.

o

(Years later, when Frank is dead and both her sons gone so long she can barely remember their faces, she watches the news and sees a young, blond man stepping off the Enterprise. He turns his blue, blue eyes to the camera and standing there, looking at her across the gap of twenty-five years, is George. He waves at the crowd with her long, slender hands.

She falls to her knees in her empty living room and weeps.)

o


	6. another paper saint

Added warnings in the first chapter. Or just go to the blanket warning in my profile. No whining.

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_Pavel knows who James T. Kirk is. Everyone does. Words: 1000; Title: Tom McRae_

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**another paper saint (has put us all in danger)**

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In hindsight, the men's room just off the main deck is not the best hiding place, but Pavel is sort of out of time and it's better to have his minor breakdown here than on the bridge where everyone can see.

This is too much. He is seventeen, only in his second year at the Academy and he might be a genius but going from the classroom into a battlefield is _too much._ Twenty-four hours ago he was brooding over homework. Since then he has been made navigator of the Starfleet's newest, biggest and shiniest ship, has seen the home fleet carrying most of his classmates destroyed, lost his captain to a madman with a bone to pick, watched a world destroyed, witnessed the acting captain fall to pieces less than ten feet from him and declare himself emotionally compromised.

And now they are chasing the thing that took the captain, destroyed Vulcan and all the other Starfleet ships. On the orders of one James T. Kirk. Who isn't supposed to be on board, saved them all, fought the Romulans, almost started a mutiny, got marooned on an ice planet, managed to get back on board via _transwarp beaming _– which, by the way, is _not possible _– and then took over as acting captain from the acting captain.

Pavel has heard of Mad Jim Kirk before, of course he has. Who hasn't? He's the guy that all the women at the Academy want and all the men want to hit. He never loses a fight, no matter with who and aces all his classes even though he attends barely half of them. A genius with a mean right hook and a talent for dealing with people. And, so rumor says, a magical ability to hold his liquor.

Bigger than life, the girls all sigh when the conversation turns to Kirk.

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And yes, Pavel envies Kirk. Envied. Before everything went to hell in a flagship. Pavel is good with numbers. Great even. Kirk is great with numbers and words and people and despite being a genius, he is not a skinny, pale kid that no-one takes seriously.

Once upon a time, Pavel would have done almost anything to have a bit of what Jim Kirk has. Now (only a day later, he reminds himself, twenty-four hours, 1440 minutes, 86 400 seconds, only) he isn't so sure. Because Kirk is crazy. He snuck on a ship where he has no place on, he jumped out of a shuttle, he argued with Acting Captain Spock like he knows better and after being marooned for insubordination, he comes back and picks a fight. With a Vulcan.

And gets beat and then promoted and then he tells them all that they're chasing after the enemy, sitting in the command chair like it's made for him, bruised and battered and grinning a glint of teeth. Brave, mad and brilliant.

Pavel has heard, more than once, that there is a thin line between genius and madman but never before has he found a living example of the phrase. Kirk toes the line, dragging them all along with him and any second now, they might tip either way, might fall and land in madness and death or absolute triumph.

_Too much._

Larger than life, Pavel thinks with a shudder, clutching the sides of the sink and trying to keep it together.

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"Hey, kid, you okay?"

The voice startles him so badly that he almost jumps out of his skin and trips as he whirls around to face the object of his little meltdown, standing in the doorway, looking at him with those blue eyes that probably glow in the dark.

"I am fine… sir." He tacks the title onto his answer at the last moment, remembering that this man is now his captain. Acting captain. Less than twelve hours from stowaway to captain. That has to be some kind of record.

Kirk looks him up and down, frowns. "You sure?" he asks again and his voice is raw and painful, his throat obviously bruised from Spock's viselike grip because, for goodness's sake, the man tried to choke Kirk to death how long ago? Twenty minutes? If that much.

He shrugs, feeling himself unable to lie under that piercing gaze. "It is all a bit much, sir. I am just a cadet."

Kirk's laugh is sharp and surprisingly loud in the enclosed space. "You're telling me! But you're not doing too bad of a job, kid."

Pavel shifts on his feet and says nothing. Kirk's grin softens into something smoother and less bright. "I mean, you did save my life. Have I said thank you for that yet?"

Surprised, the young ensign shakes his head. "No, sir."

"Well then, thanks for saving my ass from going splat on an exploding planet, Ensign."

He shrugs and blushes, having no idea what to say, because he was only doing his job, wasn't he? He tells the captain so and he waggles his eyebrows. "Exactly. Now get back out there and keep doing that, okay?"

He didn't think it's possible to blush any brighter, but Pavel does because Kirk didn't just come here by accident. He knew where his navigator went and he came after him to calm him down.

That's… Pavel nods and tries a shaky smile that almost works. It seems enough for Kirk, who smiles back and claps him on the shoulder hard enough to make him stumble.

Larger than life. No doubt about it.

o

(Half an hour later he is back on the bridge, telling the others of his idea and the doctor asks him how old he is and looks very stern as he repeats to Kirk, "He's seventeen."

Pavel expects that to be the end of his idea but Kirk just rolls his eyes, dismissing the worry. Taking Pavel, seventeen-year-old awkward Russian kid-genius for full.

That's when the last piece clicks into place.)

o


	7. shot by those who don't

The funny reared its head. Had to happen sometime. There's too much crack-potential is this fandom.

o

_Sulu, his sword and his captain. Words: 1040; Title: random, sourceless quote_

o

**shot by those who don't**

o

The first time the captain enters the training room when Sulu is practicing katas before his shift, a terrible, terrible sense of foreboding swamps the pilot. He loves his captain, he really does, like everyone else on this ship and their dead gram'ma, but there are things that are just Bad Ideas.

Capitalized courtesy of one Dr. Leonard McCoy who has the dubious pleasure of stitching the captain back together afterwards. There is a rumor going around the ship that the doctor actually has a list of things that are considered to be Bad Ideas. Among them: Letting the captain roam free on a pleasure planet, leaving the captain alone with Uhura under any circumstances not life threatening and letting the captain drink any alcohol not previously approved by qualified medical personnel (read: Bones).

Later, perhaps, Sulu will find McCoy and get him to add another item to the list: Letting the captain play with swords. It might prevent the question Sulu just _knows _is coming.

Then he finishes his final kata and the captain grins at him, tips an imaginary hat and says, "See you on the bridge."

He doesn't make the slightest attempt to get his hands on the sword before he spins on his heel and leaves.

Sulu blinks.

o

They repeat this little exercise five more times and every single time Hikaru hopes that this time the captain won't come back , lean against the wall and watch him again. But it happens and he's there and he watches and the pilot has visions of Kirk with a sword in hand, waving it about with that wild, child-like enthusiasm of his and accidentally cutting off the limbs of innocent bystanders, or worse his own.

(And then McCoy would sew them back on, knock Kirk out with a hypo and come after Sulu with his sharp, shiny surgical equipment for giving their hyperactive captain a weapon. And Sulu wouldn't even run very hard because he'd know that he deserves anything the good doctor does to him because he's been on this crew for almost six months now and he knows that Kirk's mug shot is next to the definition of _Danger to self and others_ in the dictionary.)

So offering the captain his katana is a monumentally stupid idea. On the other hand, being watched makes the place between his shoulder blades itch and the captain won't go away before he has what he wants. He's a bit like a dog with a big, juicy bone, he is. Scotty's words. Might as well be gospel.

So for five lurk-and-watch sessions after the first, Hikaru tries to work up the nerve to hand a deadly weapon off to a man crazy enough to get into a fist fight with a pissed off Vulcan.

o

"Would you like to try?" he finally asks after the seventh time Kirk comes to watch and hopes really hard that his cringe is not as visible as he thinks it is. He's fairly sure that he manages to keep the expression of abject dread off his face though.

(It's not that he's scared of Kirk or anything. Don't get him wrong. The entire crew loves Kirk, as mentioned above. It's hard not to when the man so obviously would do anything for them, including throwing himself into the line of fire. But the fact remains – and that's probably _why _he throws himself into the line of fire so carelessly – that their dear captain is a bit… unstable. Uhura claims it's because he got hit over the head with one bottle too many during all those bar brawls. The rest of them silently agree. Doesn't change the fact that they love him, though. But they have perhaps a bit more healthy respect for their leader's volatility than the average crew, is all he's saying.)

Kirk pushes off the wall, uncrosses his arms and grins. "Can you imagine me with a sword?" he demands.

Erm. Yes, he can. That's part of the problem.

"I'll pass, Sulu." The blond man tells his pilot with a rueful headshake. "I don't do the whole graceful and smooth thing."

Then why the hell is he here? And why has Sulu spent the past week in shivering puddles of dread whenever the captain looked at him? "What do you do, sir?"

"It's Jim, and me?" His grin turns into a laugh and he answers, "I do fast, hard and dirty."

Bar brawls. (It doesn't sound like much until you've been laid out with a broken leg and the captain stands between you and a hostile monster alien armed with nothing but his fists and smart mouth and actually _wins._)

"Then why are you here?"

Out of nowhere Kirk pulls a knife that is definitely not Starfleet regulation – (Hikaru should know, it took a whole stack of paper work in triplicate for him to get permission to carry his sword and even then, it's only when they're outside the ship. Not that he ever obeys that little rule because Kirk doesn't mind and the motto on the Enterprise is something like _Always at the ready._ Or maybe Kirk's version thereof which is, _With our luck, you better eat, shower and sleep with that thing, Sulu._ That's a motto, too.) – and flips it so the blade runs along his forearm. Then he kicks off his boots and steps onto the mat across from the pilot with a grin that matches his blade.

"Wanna spar?"

And Sulu thinks he's probably just as mad as their fearless leader, because he matches that razor blade grin down to the last dimple, hefts his katana and says, cocky as they come, "Do your worst, Captain."

(Kirk does.

And he really does fight hard and dirty. In the aftermath, Sulu is really, _really _glad that the man has no interest in swordplay because if he can do that much damage with a four inch blade, the Hikaru doesn't want to know what he'd to with one that's three feet long.

Besides, he's kind of scared of McCoy, to be honest.

That doesn't stop him from setting up a time and place for weekly spars, though.)

o


	8. on my skin left

o

_Point is, scars are only skin. Words: 1050; Title: Carina Round_

o

**on my skin left (the scent of indignation)**

o

In hindsight it's sort of a miracle that he managed to stay dressed around Bones for as long as he did. (Not like that, pervert. Not that he'd mind _that,_ but it's just not, okay? When Bones said his wife took everything in the divorce, that apparently included his sex drive, so, just not.)

No, what this is about is the fact that they've been rooming together for months and Bones has never, until this moment, seen Jim naked. (Dress in the bathroom, wear a shirt to bed, strip in the dark.) Jim played it well and he played it with such swagger that Bones never even wondered why.

Jim, on the other hand, did wonder. Wonder why he went to such lengths to hide something from his roommate that he had never bothered to hide before. (Because it's not as if you get the (deserved) reputation of a sex god without taking off your clothes. A lot.) Before Bones, he always had a story for every scar, bullshit he made up and never remembered once the hangover set it. He's pretty sure most of them involved heroics and other shit. The kind that the people he picks up in bars for a quick fuck dig. Like he said, bullshit.

(That burn scar is from fighting some tentacle alien, swear to god, not from my drunk stepfather that spilled his fucking coffee down my side. Honest. And that cut's from falling off a tree while trying to save a kitten. Nothing to do with getting flung into a wall. At all. Cross my heart and… yeah.)

And it's not like it's really that bad. Sure, he's got his fair share of scars from being knocked around by Frank. But he's got just as many from the stupid stunts he pulled (driving a car off a cliff, anyone?) and from his attempted suicides by bar brawl. All in all, they make for a fairly impressive collection ranging from his collarbone down to his thighs.

And he's never hidden them before. Except… Bones. He thinks that maybe it's because he never gives a fuck about the people he strips for (excepting perhaps Gaila, who's a bit like him and just crazy enough to be buckets of fun) and he does care about that doctor. Cares what Bones thinks. (Because, damn, their second day at the Academy the man came back from class with a bottle of cheap booze and a bag full of take-out and what more can a guy ever ask for?)

He doesn't want Bones to look at him and see his scars, see his fucked up past. He doesn't want to see pity in those gorgeous eyes. Not directed at him. Not ever.

They're just scars and they might have made him what he is (shit like that _defines _you, no two ways about it, no matter how hard you try and how fast you drive) but they're not _who _he is.

He's Jim Kirk.

Nothing more and (he's learning that) nothing less either. Jim Kirk. Not George, not Sammy, not Frank's punching bag, not Winona's unloved youngest.

He's not the kid that drove a car off a cliff. He's the kid that jumped at the last second and clawed his way back onto solid ground.

But, alas, all good things come to an end and so here he stands, dripping wet from his shower, hanging in the doorway with a curse on his lips because Bones is supposed to work tonight but apparently not, because he's sitting on his bed, gaze fixed on a scar that runs across the left side of Jim's ribs, over three inches long. Broken bottle when he was fifteen. Frank's last farewell to his stepson.

Jim grunts something unflattering and the doctor finally tears his eyes away, looking a bit startled and yep, there it is. That soft, goo-ey look people get when they realize what a _poor, messed up kid _he is.

"Christ, Jim-" he starts, and gets cut off just as fast.

"Save it, Bones."

"But those are-"

"Just scars." He finishes with a hint of steel in his voice and makes no move to get dressed because that would be hiding and never let it be said that Jim Kirk hides from anything.

The doctor's mouth snaps shut with an audible click and he meets his roommate's cool look head on, considering, weighing. It's a look usually reserved for people about to get hypo-ed into the next century. (How fast can you run and how much of a fight will you put up when I catch you?)

And Jim's answer, always and forever, is _can't ever keep me down._

It's his very own motto. Right after _if it has a nervous system it can be flirted with._

Or maybe before. His priorities are sort of shifting all the time.

Then Bones asks, kind of hard, "Were you a very clumsy child, Jim?"

(Fell down the stairs, Ma'am. Since when do stairs leave fist shaped bruises, boy?)

Jim smiles, humorless and real. "Absolutely."

He watches, still hanging in that doorway, as something in his friend softens and relaxes. If he can smile about it, it's gotta be okay, or something like that. But the hard-ass look isn't completely gone yet. "Anyone I need to drug and tie up for ya?"

Jim cocks his head and actually considers the offer. But in the end…, "Nah. Not worth the effort."

"Good," is the only answer he receives as the doctor pushes past him into the bathroom and shuts the door on his ass. He snorts and finally grabs some sweat pants to pull on. No use bothering with the t-shirt now.

Later, after his shower, Bones breaks out the good stuff and they get shit faced on booze that's older than them and somewhere around midnight Bones looks at Jim in that mellow, drunk way he has and says, "I'm sorry, Jim."

It's not pity, just a simple apology. (Sorry it had to happen to you, out of all the bastards out there.) And Jim lets it go because he's more fascinated by the tiles on the ceiling and that's that.

They're just scars.

o


	9. spread out against the sky

o

_She always thought her dreams were too big for Leonard McCoy. Words: 730; Title: T._

o

**spread out against the sky**

o

Jocelyn is fifteen when her parents move her to a hole in the wall town in Georgia and she hates it. She hates the country air, hates the farms, hates the lack of places to be and go and see, hates the hicks with their drawling accents and booming laughter and their seemingly rock-solid conviction that they are good enough for her.

She hates the whole damn state and if Klingons came and blew it off the face of the Earth, she'd send them a thank you card. Because she hates it. She is pretty, she is smart and she is young and she has dreams. Dreams that don't include farm animals of any size, color, or species. At all.

And then she meets Len. And he is one of those self-assured, drawling, goddamn Georgian hicks that she hates but he also has a tongue in his head that could scald the skin off anyone and anything and that makes him okay.

Jocelyn hates Georgia and Len pretty much hates the whole world.

Plus, he is smart and going to be a doctor and get out of this place, so she figures she might as well go along for the ride. She is twenty when they marry, which is only acceptable in hick towns, but this time she doesn't mind so much because she can already see Georgia disappearing in the rear view mirror.

Just as soon as Len gets through med school.

That's the plan.

Only Len doesn't know about the plan, apparently.

He finishes school, Jo is born and then, faster than you can say 'outta here' he sets up his practice right there, in the capital of goddamn nowhere.

_Country doctor _Jocelyn's _ass._

And then, one day when she is going on thirty she sits next to her five-year-old daughter at the dining room table, she looks up and looks at Len, who seems content with his steak and potatoes, his stories of treating people with splinters in their hands and pulled muscles in their backs. He's happy.

And she's slowly dying.

She had these dreams, dreams of a big city and a successful life, of smart friends and parties and going _somewhere._ Sitting here, with Jo shooting peas across the table, she can't remember a single one of them.

All she remembers that somehow, somewhere along the road, Len managed to convince her that he was her ticket out of here when really, he just tied her down tighter.

Len has no dreams and he never did.

She turns the divorce into a shit storm because she can, because it makes her feel alive and she's _so _angry, so very angry because he made her spend the best decade of her life with him, and he sucked the dreams right out of her.

And because he drinks a bit much and works at awkward times, she gets Jo and with her the house, the car and the money. She watches Len walk off, hunched and worn, twenty years older and she feels vindicated because damn if he didn't take away just as much of her time. She just did it faster.

Now all she has to do is wait for someone with dreams to come along and then they can get the hell out of here. For good this time. For real.

Jocelyn dreams again.

Dreams right until the moment, three years later, when Jo screams from the living room, "Ma, come see, Daddy's famous!"

(…USS Enterprise… Saved the planet… Fought bravely…. Many losses…. Crew under James T. Kirk, sons of George and Winona Kirk.… During the altercation that cost Vulcan…)

And there's Len, standing between the young captain with the glowing blue eyes and the stern Vulcan, waving tiredly at the crowd along with the rest of the crew.

Len. Her ex-huband. Jo's father. Country doctor from Georgia without a single dream in his body, without a single plan or spark or… or _anything._

He helped save the world and she's still here, still in this rotten small town, still waiting for something big and glorious to come and sweep her off her feet like she did when she was fifteen.

At her side, Jo jumps up and down, demanding to be allowed to call Daddy, "Please, Ma, please!"

She nods absentmindedly, pushing her daughter toward the vidphone, still staring at the screen fixedly even long after Len's tired but smiling face is gone.

(It wasn't Len that held her back. She did that all by herself and now she has no-one left to blame.)

o


	10. a pull to the flow

So either I completely tainted Spock's voice with my own, or I am scarily Vulcan because that was easy as pie to write.

o

_Vulcan and linguist. It's not entirely logical. Words: 1100; Title: Bon Iver_

o

**a pull to the flow**

o

He is a Vulcan and she is a linguist.

o

She makes an illogical secret of her first name based on superstitious beliefs concerning an entirely unempirical power over individuals stemming from the knowledge of their names.

He tells people to call him Spock and rarely even twitches an eyebrow over it. A name is a tool to identify and specify. There is no secret meaning in that, only effectiveness.

o

She loves languages. Loves their nuances and hidden quirks, loves how words can say one thing and mean something completely different, how some concepts can be expressed in a single syllable in one language and require an entire sentence in another.

She is endlessly fascinated by the origins and evolutions of languages. How a word means one thing and then, though a mistake or misunderstanding, gains a new nuance while the original is lost and the end result is one hundred percent different from the beginning and in no way logically related to it.

She quotes poets and philosophers in twelve languages and insists that their words are magic and wisdom.

He tries to understand her fascination and studies the basics of linguistics to better converse with her. He finds phonemes that in no way match the symbols representing them, finds homophones and homographs, morphemes that have multiple meanings and others that can only be used in a single, unique instance.

Supposedly there is a logical foundation at the root of every language, a system of sounds and corresponding symbols, but all he finds is a mess of plosives, fricatives and glottal stops that combine to something foreign and imprecise, something entirely _messy. _

o

He loves numbers (as much as he loves anything because he is Vulcan) for their precision and their inability to lie and deceive as words often do. If a number is wrong, the problem lies in the process, in the organic component of the one that calculated it.

Every equation can be solved, every number holds a truth and if one combines those truths and equations, one can understand the entirety of the universe down to the last atom.

Maths and physics are clear cut and entirely logical, perfectly arranged in systems, one based on the other, rising in complexity and subject.

Language, he often finds, is barely enough to express the perfection, the utter _control _that numbers provide over the world.

He can say, "We are currently moving at warp eight," but he cannot express, within that sentence, what 'currently' means in measures of time and place, he cannot communicate what warp eight is, the exact speed and motion, the relation between ship and space.

She tells him numbers are dry, without truth. He tells her that numbers contain _all _truth.

She looks at him, waspish and angry and says, "Then calculate love for me."

o

He tries.

But his information is incomplete and the variables too many, the unknowns overwhelming.

o

He keeps her behind after class (despite the unprofessionalism of that action) and locks his office door before sitting behind his desk and staring at her intensely for long minutes (2.35, to be exact).

Then he says, "I am unable to calculate the emotion you refer to as love."

He fully expects her to jeer at his failure as his class mates on Vulcan used to do, to see the emotion called triumph in her facial expressions and have her explain what the point of her challenge was.

Instead she smiles at him in that soft way he cannot quite understand no matter how hard he tries and says, "See?"

"I am afraid I do not. Please explain."

She heaves a great sigh that implies she feels slight disappointment and burdened by his request. But she flings her bag carelessly on one of his visitors' chairs and sinks into the other. For a minute she thinks intensely.

"Why did you fail?"

He considers her question and then carefully responds, "I found too many variables and unknowns in the equation I attempted to create. One of those being the lack of evidence proving that 'love' does in fact exist."

"Do you doubt it does?"

"I have found no evidence of it."

She bites her lip (to contain her initial and instinctive reaction to his statement that she obviously finds displeasing. He has witnessed this before.) and appears to sort her thoughts in order to present an argument that he will accept as valid. "You believe in abstracts, don't you?"

"Please define the term," he requests.

"You believe in, let's say, IQ, despite the fact that it can't be directly assessed. It can only be constructed from tests and theories."

"Accepted," he allows, waiting for her to make the connection to their present argument.

"So abstracts exist."

"Accepted."

"Love, by definition of the word, is one of those. Evidence says it exists, although we can't quantify it."

He mulls that over and finds no flaw in her statement. Human behavior (and that of other species) implies the presence of an illogical, invisible entity that moves them to certain acts, like holding hands and sacrificing their lives for others of their kind.

"I can agree with you that love exists," he confirms and feels a twinge of satisfaction as watching her expression brighten.

"And you can't calculate it."

He frowns, interweaving his fingers in front of his face as he contemplates. "I assume the flaw lies in what you call the 'human factor'."

Her smile grows wider as she acknowledges, "Maybe. But you can still say it, can't you?"

He raises one eyebrow, waiting for her to elaborate. "You can still say you love someone even if you don't understand the complete meaning of the term."

"I suppose so," he allows, reluctantly.

She stands and walks around his desk, her hips swaying in a blatant invitation he has learned to enjoy as aesthetically pleasing and a precursor of pleasant activities. With gentle hands she pulls his own apart and situates herself in his lap, frankly and openly.

She cups his face with her hands, thumbs tracing his cheekbones, her eyes fixed on his.

"I love you," she whispers.

He finds her statement valid and kisses her.

o

(More than a year later his father finds him after the destruction of their home planet and tells him, "I married her because I loved her."

Spock remains silent.)

o

He is a Vulcan and she is a linguist.

In between, in a place of constructs, beyond the reach of numbers, there is love.

He accepts that as a fact.

o


	11. say my name

I'm almost scared to say it out loud, but these puppies are developing a plot. Beware!

o

_Cupcake has a name, damnit! Words: 1300;_

o

**say my name**

o

He can admit that the first time Kirk calls him Cupcake, he deserves it, just a bit.

He's been wearing his spanking new Starfleet uniform for a grand total of three hours and he's itching to prove to some backwater hick that he's better, that he deserves to wear that red. He's Thomas Riley, Starfleet recruit. Plus, he's had a few beers. And he's trying to impress Uhura, which, in hindsight, Kirk was doing a better job of than him. (He was still failing spectacularly, but she actually laughed at his antics and that's more than Riley got. And after they got kicked out of the bar, well, the evening was over then either way.)

So, Cupcake, big whooping bar brawl, Captain Pike intervening. That's kind of embarrassing. He survives, though and is sure he'll never see that little punk kid again, so, whatever.

o

The next time he sees the guy is on the shuttle, bruised all over and still with that cocky, arrogant fucking smirk on his face.

He and that weird, caustic doctor stick together from the first, like glue, and during the flight, he hears snippets of Kirk trying to talk the good doctor down with all kinds of random shit. He hears the word 'cupcake' once or twice and grinds his teeth, even after he realizes that it's used in reference to all the cadets. (As if Kirk isn't one of them, is better and too damn awesome to ever sink to their level just because he's not wearing a uniform yet.)

o

Over the next three months, his friends elbow Riley, chuckling, every time Kirk walks by with that goddamned look of glee on his face, talking about 'pack mentality of cupcakes', 'mating habits of cupcakes' and 'facial expressions of cupcakes'.

Asshole.

For some reason, the rest of the Academy doesn't take nearly as much offense to being compared to pastry as Riley does, although what happens at the end of those three months might have something to do with it.

It's Saturday and they all have twenty-four hours leave, half of which the entire campus plans to spend in a bar, getting dead drunk.

So does Kirk.

They bump into each other shortly after midnight and Kirk pulls back, looking too drunk to stand, squints up at him and tells the damn doctor, "Look at that, it's the Original Cupcake."

He maintains, to this day, that Kirk _really _deserved that right hook.

o

Variations of the theme get flung at him for the next three years whenever they run into each other, which is surprisingly often. Original Cupcake, Cupcake Prime, Cupcake Alpha, and Cupcake Number One are just a few of the nicknames Kirk makes up, both sober and smashed.

And no matter how many times he gets the shit beat out of him, it just doesn't seem to deter the little fuck. At all.

o

So it's really not a surprise that, when Spock's order comes to hunt down intruders in engineering, he's a bit eager. Just a teeny-weeny little bit.

That look on Kirk's face when his gaze wanders from the phaser aimed at him to the person doing the aiming is something Riley'll remember fondly for the rest of his life.

Poetic justice, it is.

o

Fifteen minutes later that damn punk is captain.

Poetic justice somebody's grandma's ass.

o

So Kirk uses his power only for good and actually saves Earth in a spectacle of daring-do not seen since… ever. He gets points for that. Almost enough points, in fact, to get him out of the negative numbers.

They limp back to Earth at a snail's pace with Kirk still playing captain and surprisingly, it works. No mutinies, no inexplicable deaths, not even any more bridge brawls or a single complaint about sexual harassment. Either the doc finally managed to put a muzzle on Kirk, or the guy has hidden depths.

When they get back to Earth, there's a recommendation for every single surviving crew member on the desks of the admiralty, written by Acting Captain James T. Kirk and backed by First Officer Commander Spock.

Even for Riley.

o

The offer to make his temporary post on the Enterprise as head of security a permanent one is not all that surprising. The 'fleet is down a lot of its soldiers and eighty percent of its cadets. They need everyone with two legs and two hands at the moment.

He turns the offer down the same day Kirk gets made the ship's captain for real.

What_ is_ surprising is that his request to be stationed elsewhere is turned down.

_By Kirk._

o

He tries, no less than five times, to confront the captain about his harebrained decision and finally gives up when the man literally slams a door in his face with all the maturity of a five-year-old. He figures it's just Kirk's weird, convoluted way of making sure he's still around to tease when they are thousands of light years away from the Academy.

Why he lets the man get away with it, though, he has no idea.

o

Six months into their first five year mission, they beam down to a supposedly empty planet to gather intel and data.

McCoy, Sulu, Kirk and three security personnel (one of them being, of course, Riley) that should be completely unneeded but aren't when it turns out that the planet is not as empty as they thought and the creatures living underground aren't all that happy with the crew for trampling around on their roofs.

There's a quick and brutal fight during which Sulu gents injured and Kirk jumps in front of him to protect him, completely missing that one of the enemy is about to poke a hole into him with a wicked looking spear.

Riley sincerely hopes that Kirk develops severe self-esteem issues from having to be saved from primitive dirt creatures by none other than yours truly, Cupcake Prime.

o

They beam up just in the nick of time, race each other to the sickbay and watch anxiously as first Sulu and then a few other, minor wounds get patched up. Kirk gets priority after Sulu because he's the captain and although he insists he's completely fine, they've watched the idiot collapse on the bridge a few times too many to risk it.

After he escapes McCoy's clutches – surprisingly actually unharmed – he hangs around the sickbay for another hour and when Riley finally takes off after having his hand bandaged, he stops him by stepping in his way.

"I'm really not in the mood for pastry jokes," he preempts all stupid commentary and then slowly tag on a, "sir."

Kirk smiles and snorts. "I was going to say thank you, actually. You saved my ass down there."

Wow. Somewhere, Satan is ice-skating because Kirk is actually speaking with him in a way that is neither condescending nor joking. Satisfaction, here comes Tom Riley.

"Just doing my job, sir." And if he lays the sarcasm on a bit thick on that one, he's pretty sure no-one is going to call him on it.

"Yeah well, you did it damn fine and I figure… since I'm captain now and Bones keeps pestering about being more mature – "

(So the doc _does _muzzle him!)

"-I guess I should stop calling you Cupcake, Cupcake."

And this, ladies and gentlemen, is Satan doing figure eights.

For the longest moment they stand and stare at each other, one dumb struck the other waiting. Finally Riley manages to nod, still fighting the urge to let his jaw hit the floor because Kirk! Acting like an adult! Better yet, admitting that he's an arrogant little asshole!

Kirk's grin lightens up a notch and the acceptance of his apology. Then he awkwardly scratches the back of his head and asks, in a very casual voice, "So, what's you name again?"

o


	12. we're right behind you

See this? This is crack. Feel free to skip it. I know I would if I could. Also, I'm pretty sure I deserve to be shot for this.

o

_Jim has the crappiest karma McCoy has ever seen. Words: 1300; Title: Garbage_

o

**we're right behind you (go, baby, go go)**

o

They are big, brownish blobs. At least that's McCoy's first thought. His second is that no matter what Jim says, after this mission he gets tied to the command chair whenever there is an Away Team going out because it's him.

It's always him. The captain must have been a serial killing, child eating Klingon in a past life to have that much bad karma because contrary to popular opinion, it's not every expedition that goes down the drain. Nope, it's only those that Captain James T. Kirk goes on.

Without him, the monsters stay asleep, the sex pollen stays inactive, the natives stay friendly and the poisonous gasses in the air just wait another day to implode. And don't even get the doctor started on all the ridiculous ways the transporters seem to fail whenever Jim's around. How many different kinds of atmospheric interferences can there be?

Back to the matter at hand. Big, brown blobs. With claws and teeth and a grudge. Coming right at him, the esteemed captain and his stoic first officer.

Just another day at the office.

He should have run from that shuttle screaming instead of offering Jim his flask four years ago. He might still have a few more scraps of his sanity left then.

Spock, who is watching the approach of their certain death with the usual detached expression that the doctor swears means he's cackling madly on the inside, says conversationally, "I believe it would be wise to flee and attempt to look for a place in which to find cover from these creatures."

McCoy spins on his heel to do just that, when the first officer's words sink in. "Did you just suggest we play goddamn hide and seek with the mud monsters?"

"Mud monsters?" Jim pipes up from the hobgoblin's other side. "I like that. Mud monsters."

Spock blinks very slowly. "Indeed I did."

Behind them, Mud Monster #1 roars.

They run.

o

The last time Leonard McCoy played hide and seek was three years ago, when his daughter arm-twisted him into it under the threat of singing him the new song she learned at school.

He didn't enjoy it then and he sure as hell doesn't enjoy it when it's not his cute, pigtailed daughter doing the searching but a horde of pissed of Mud Monsters (Jim has taken to the term like a duck to water and promptly capitalized it). Nor does he enjoy the fact that he's squished between a Vulcan (who can double as a furnace, no problem) and Jim (who can't even hold still when he's held at hypo-point, much less when he's nervous and trying to see where the monsters went).

He growls as Jim digs his elbow into his ribs _again _and he involuntarily jerks backwards, almost toppling into Spock's lap. He tries to distract himself by coming up with ways to stop Jim from ever setting foot off the Enterprise again when the captain suddenly flings himself fully to the ground, pulling McCoy along.

"What the fuck-?" he starts cursing by sheer knee-jerk reflex, only to have Jim knee him in the side in an effort to shut him up.

"They're coming," their fearless captain hisses and the doctor doesn't just shut up, he holds his breath and prays to god. Or, in this case, Scotty. Basically the same thing, considering that the Scot is somewhere above their heads, with the power to save them or let them bite it.

o

Scotty is probably lying in the turbine room drunk off his ass and singing Christmas carols because five minutes later, they are running again and there's no end in sight.

Plus, it looks like the Mud Monsters have much better stamina than a couple of guys who spend most of their time on a ship, in space, fighting paperwork. And a Vulcan, but as far as McCoy is concerned, those bastards can just try to eat Spock. He'd probably give them indigestion because there is just no way someone that dry and humorless can be tasty. Unless you're used to eating cardboard. Really tough cardboard.

Also, his inner doctor supplies, he's apparently going loopy from adrenaline and sheer blind panic. That and he's pretty sure he hasn't gotten enough oxygen into his poor lungs for at least two minutes.

o

The Mud Monsters are closing in, Jim already has a graze in his left side from those claws (just thinking about it gives McCoy the twitches because _Mud Monster Claws _and Jim's allergic to almost every antibiotic he has for this type of thing) and the only one who looks like he still has a few miles left in him is Spock.

"Hide again?" Jim asks between great heaving breaths.

"Worked damn fine last time, didn't it?"

"I second Doctor McCoy's sentiment." Could he at least try to sound out of breath?

Jim slumps a bit and digs out his comm unit in an attempt to try and hail the Enterprise again. Not that it worked the last ten times but they are running out of options seeing as they can already _smell _the mud.

"Kirk to Enterprise," Jim wheezes and then is forced to sharply twist out of the way of an incoming claw, almost dropping the comm in the process.

Then, to everyone's infinite relief, Scotty's tinny voice comes over the speakers, "Aye, Captain, what can we do for you?"

It's testament of how exhausted Jim is when he just snaps, "Beam us out _now_," without the slightest hint of humor in his voice. He ducks again and comes up swinging, slamming a brutal fist into the mouth of one of the Monsters that's about to swipe at him. Great. Now he's probably got a broken hand, too.

They put on one last burst of speed and then stop dead, waiting for Scotty to pick up their signals and upupup, McCoy has never been as glad to smell the stale, recycled air of the Enterprise transporter room as he is right now.

Jim stumbles upon landing and Spock catches him just barely, wrapping an arm around the captain's waist to start dragging him toward medbay and the doctor follows, ripping a tricorder out of some poor nurse's hand and waving it madly at his best friend like it's a magic healing wand.

o

Thirty minutes later Jim is patched up and the entire nursing staff has a whole new fear of their CMO. Even he didn't know he could get that nasty.

He waves Chapel (one of the brave few that stuck around after he sent the first two girls out in tears) away and checks briefly to make sure there's no-one around but himself, the captain and the first officer.

Then he gravely turns to Spock and says, "I'm thinking duct tape."

Spock does the eyebrow mambo but seems to catch on pretty quick, despite the illogic of the statement. He nods. "Seeing as how the captain has a tendency to break any and all locks, utilizing a way of binding him that does not, in fact, have any locks, seems like a logical decision."

Jim, still a little loopy from painkillers waves one hand in the air and stutters, "Wait… what?"

"Nothing, Jim, go to sleep," McCoy orders without looking at him, eyes still fixed on the first officer. "You think we can find some on this can?"

A serene nod. "I do think so, yes."

"Good."

Jim tries to speak up again, but McCoy simply reaches over and pats him on the head, free hand stroking a loaded hypo in his pocket.

The captain whimpers.

o


	13. snow white

o

_Kirk and Gaila aren't all that different, apparently. Words: 1500; Title: Florence and the Machine_

o

**snow white (stitching up the circuit board)**

o

Gaila is smart and she's beautiful and funny and a has a good heart and Uhura never, in three years of knowing her, figures out what she sees in Jim Kirk.

Sure, Kirk is smart and beautiful, too (in his own fucked up way of split lips and dilated pupils) and he can be funny, occasionally. But he doesn't have a good heart (maybe none at all, or so Uhura believes right up until they save the world together). Still, Gaila is all over him, always comes running when he calls and never turns down one of his harebrained schemes to cause mischief.

"People need to have fun," she parrots Kirk and then takes off with him for the weekend, coming back hung over and grinning from ear to ear. Kirk leaves her the way he always does, with a kiss that curls the toes of anyone just _watching _and no promises to ever return. Oh, he'll call again when he gets bored, and Gaila will answer and let herself be talked into some shitty plan, but he makes no promises. Ever. Uhura notices that about him.

o

After their first round of exams, the end of their first year at the Academy, they lie outside on the grass, staring at the sky. Gaila loves doing that, loves having all the stars above her head, close enough to reach them if she only reaches far enough.

Uhura lies next to her friend (best friend, really, because Gaila gives so much and demands so little), tipsy and happy and relieved to have survived exam week with her sanity relatively intact.

"Over there," she thinks out loud, "That's round about where you're from , right? Orion?"

Gaila shrugs, obviously not caring much, or not wanting to talk about it. Uhura falls silent, feeling awkward. She misses her home and family and grandma fiercely and she can't understand anyone else not feeling the same.

"I was unwanted, there," Gaila suddenly whispers, pointing vaguely in the direction of the invisible Orion in the night sky.

"You mean no-one- ?" (Wanted you, loved you, cherished you).

"They had no time, no room, no patience for me. I just didn't have a place there, you know." (Didn't belong.)

Uhura rolls onto her stomach, throws an arm over her friend's waist and tells her sternly, "Well, you got a place here, and you better believe it, girl."

Gaila's smile is kind of blinding in the dark.

o

Every time Gaila comes back like after her all-night stints with Kirk and throws herself onto her bed, sighing loudly, Uhura tries to find the words to say the things that tingle on her tongue like too hot food.

She, the linguist, doesn't have words.

(Words to say: I know you had a crappy childhood and you're desperate for someone to love you but Kirk never will because Kirk only loves himself and any cliff he can throw himself off and he'll either pull you down with him or leave you there, at the edge, alone and that's no way to live, with someone who'll never commit and never stay, who'll never teach you to see all the beauty you have in you, to see what you can't when you look in a mirror now. To see that you're wanted. Kirk is shallow and you're so, so much more. Please.)

She will especially never say please. Nyota Uhura does not beg.

o

One night (morning) Gaila comes back to the dorms with her shirt on backwards, too drunk to walk straight and with a nasty bruise forming along the right side of her ribcage. A bruise. She's _green,_ for god's sake, and Uhura can still _see _that damn thing in the half dark of their pre dawn room.

She swallows the rage that wells up in her because she _knows _that this is Kirks fault (and she can't yell at Gaila, because the poor girl could never see fault in that arrogant asshole).

She swallows her guilt and regurgitates it for Kirk the next morning between classes, marching up to him with Gaila trailing tiredly behind, getting ready to chew him until he's mush and then spit him out and step on him. Repeatedly. With her heel first.

But Kirk uncharacteristically looks right past her at the Orion he got into trouble the night before. He steps past Uhura and up to Gaila, laying a feather light hand above the horrible bruise under the cadet's uniform.

"You okay, beautiful?" he asks, voice low.

Gaila nods and smiles at him like he's the rising sun.

Uhura feels her rage curdle and turn bitter in her stomach.

o

She works up the nerve to ask, eventually, "What do you see in him?"

And Gaila shrugs and says, "We're kind of alike, you know?"

No, she doesn't and she wants to scream at her friend for selling herself so short, but all she manages is, "How?"

Another shrug. "We just are."

They leave it at that.

o

They have a fight over Kirk the night before it all goes to hell. About Gailia bringing him to their room when she swore not to bring anymore boys and especially not _him. _

It's not a loud fight, but a quiet, hissy one and they both go to bed feeling like hell about it, lying awake and pretending they're not. At two in the morning Gaila slips from her bed and into Uhura's, wraps an arm around her roommate and says, "I'm sorry."

And Uhura tells her with a sigh, "You could do so much better than him."

Gaila shakes her head, red curls flying everywhere. "He's not like you think he is."

They leave it at that and fall asleep still curled up together.

o

And then, less than three days later, the list of the dead from Vulcan comes through and Uhura finds herself on the observation deck after the end of the double shift she just pulled on top of a double shift, staring at the stars.

Gaila was on the Farragut.

Where Uhura was supposed to be.

The Farragut that flew into a trap and blew up, nothing but atoms in space now.

Like Uhura should be. Like Gaila is. Her best friend's dead. She is surprised that she has any tears left to cry.

o

Kirk finds her there, looking even worse than she does, a solid ring of bruises around his neck, bags under his eyes, nothing in his eyes.

"I just read the list. I'm sorry," he croaks and Uhura finds herself (for just a moment) wondering just how many people tried to choke the living daylights out of the man in the past day or so.

He sits next to her, drawing his knees to his chin, wincing as he pulls something. Uhura says nothing, just stares at the stars, trying to find earth. Because that was Gaila's home. That was the place she belonged.

After long minutes Kirk mutters, "I'm gonna miss her like hell."

Grief turns to anger in the blink of an eye and Uhura is boiling with rage for this beautiful, arrogant son of a bitch.

"You only used her!" She snarls. (for a good lay and some good fun, as a drinking buddy and someone to boost his ego, nothing more.)

Instead of rallying under the accusation, Kirk rocks a bit in his place, humming almost inaudibly. "I told her I wasn't any good for her," he whispers in the end, and then, perhaps because he's been awake for almost three days and half of everything they know just died and changed, he adds, "She always said us unwanted have to stick together, though. Because if we don't stick up for each other, who will?"

Uhura looks at Kirk, surprise plain on her face. (Kirk? Unwanted? A child without a place? _Please._) But he knows Gaila's phrase (unwanted), and he smiles crookedly at Uhura. It's a soft smile, sad, but soft and she realizes with a start that it's the first _real _smile she's ever seen on his face.

All the others were plastic and mirrors. What she expected to see, nothing more. Gaila could smile like that, anything you want, nothing real. Uhura hated when she did that.

She turns her head away from him, back to the stars outside the window, outside in the black, where the last atoms of her best friend float, lost forever. She hopes that Gaila remembered, when she died, that night in the grass, and Uhura telling her, with absolute certainty, that she belonged.

That she wasn't unwanted.

(And silently, in the same place she keeps that memory herself, Uhura promises her dead best friend to look after Kirk for her, just a bit, because someone probably has to Gaila can't anymore.)

o


	14. blood beside the river

Today is a bad day.

o

_She needs Jim to be a wolf now. Words: 1550; Title: Sarah Fimm_

o

**blood beside the river**

o

She remembers the first time she sees him, a solemn toddler in a black suit at his mother's second wedding to that asshole of a man. She is there with Mickey and baby Alex, but she finds the time to paw her son off to her husband and sit next to him, tiny Jimmy.

She knows the story, same as everyone else in the galaxy. Jimmy and Win live only because George died for them. She offers Jim chocolate cake because every kid likes chocolate cake. He turns her down with a very serious shake of his head and traces patterns on the table cloth.

He lives because his father died. She wonders how her sister thinks about that.

o

The next time Karen lays eyes on her twelve-year-old nephew, she is ashamed of her sister. Ashamed of her amazing, strong, stubborn, smart Winona.

That boy's not a child. He's an animal.

His eyes are like endless skies and glass, empty and shiny. His wiry frame is hard and built for speed, for evasion. He looks at her, looks at her seven-year-old son plastered to her leg, her silent husband hanging back, and she knows that he's assessing them. Trying to figure out the currency of the realm.

(Win, she thinks, oh Win what have you done to your son?)

But she knows the answer already. To the eyes of the world, Jim Kirk is a miracle baby born from disaster and death and the black. To Winona he's a constant reminder, a bargain gone bad. A boy for a man.

(And look what came of that, he drove a car off a cliff, barely survived and didn't utter a single word of protest when his step father washed his hands of him, sent him to a far off colony and relatives he doesn't remember. All Winona did was give her quiet consent via vidphone conference.)

Karen promises to do better as long as Jim's with her. Starting now.

She holds out her hand for him to take and smiles. "I gave you chocolate cake once, d'ya remember that?"

o

He doesn't talk, lies when he thinks he's in trouble and fights too often. He has no sense of self preservation, taking on three boys twice his size without hesitation. When Mickey tries to tell him something, tries to teach, he shuts down completely.

Alex though, is all bright eyed and amazed at his older cousin, who protects him and takes him wherever he goes. Mickey worries but Karen lets them because Jim never gets into trouble when he has Alex with him. He likes protecting people, she thinks, likes it because it gives him a sense of worth he can't find in himself.

She doesn't see the scars and he never shows, but she knows they are there, can read their stories in his weary regard of Mickey, his refusal to trust in authority, his habit of doing everything on his own, independent to a fault.

He reminds Karen of a wolf, at times, feral and cornered, vicious if needed but capable of great care towards his own. Only Jim has never had his own. His brother ran away and Win has never been there for him.

Karen used to admire her bigger sister for being up there, with the stars, close enough to touch infinity. Now she looks at Jim and wonders how Win could trade this for the black.

o

He's almost (almost) lost that hunted, empty look when the food starts running out and it comes back like it was never gone. His words and smiles dry up and he leaves Alex with her more and more as he goes out and spends his days doing God knows what.

She never asks, afraid of the answer.

He is always there when she goes to the market, though, always at her side. When fights start breaking out over the smallest amounts of food, he's there.

He fights like she knew he would, fierce, wild, unpredictable. An animal under the thin veneer of a teenaged boy.

Mickey is falling apart at the seams, no idea how to protect his family, how to get them through it. Karen holds it together because she is a mother and she has to, simple as that. Jim is the one she relies on, for all that he is only thirteen.

The last time they go to the market, he saves her life.

o

When Kodos's henchmen come to take them from their home to the hastily erected warehouses that no-one ever returns from, Jim doesn't say a word. He only glares at the soldiers, glares at them with blue fire in his eyes and they squirm under his sheer, brutal hate.

They are hoarded into one of the warehouses like animals and the doors close behind them with a resounding boom. Kodos stands at the front of the room, on a dais, and he tells them that they must die so others may live. He tells them that they will be executed because they are worth less than their fellow human beings.

He tells them to hold still and die with grace, tells them as if he's talking about the weather. Then he gives the signs and his men start moving through the crowd, a single bullet for every man, woman and child.

Karen looks at Mickey, who has nothing but despair in his eyes, looks at her son, barely eight years old, clutching her shirt like a lifeline. And she looks at her nephew, whose gaze flits around the room, taking in doors and guards, guns and escape routes.

A cornered animal.

"Jim," she calls quietly. He turns to look at her, endless skies and glass. She puts a hand on her son's messy hair and asks, "Can you get Alex out of here?"

She's not asking if he can save himself. She already knows that. She's asking if he can save her son and he hears the distinction and understands it. She knows he does. She wanted to love him, to give him a chance but now it's the animal she needs, the boy with the dead eyes.

She needs Jim to be the wolf his step father and absent mother made him. She'd tell him that she does love him, and that she's sorry, but she can't. She needs the survivor now, not the beaten little boy that is screaming somewhere inside of him.

"If you give me a distraction," he finally answers and she finds herself nodding, shoving Alex at him after a last hug and kiss. Telling him to be good, to listen to Jim, be a big boy.

Jim kneels down, whispering in his cousin's ear, quick and hard, while she looks around for anything to use as a distraction. Instead she finds Sue-Ellen, an arrogant, distasteful woman that she never got along with. The blonde is holding her daughters, twin girls of eleven years, close, her gaze on Jim, who has started pulling Alex toward the back of the sluggishly panicking, numb and scared crowd. She hesitates and then shoves the girls toward him with a few stern words. Jim's reputation precedes him it seems, but Karen doesn't have it in her to be mad. Right here, right now, the two women want the same thing. They want to save their children.

She walks over to Sue-Ellen, dragging Mickey along.

"He'll get them out?" she asks, her face harder than Karen has ever seen it.

"Yes."

She turns to look for the kids, finds the last bits of her son disappearing behind a wall of human bodies. For another second Jim's blond mop of hair is visible, then that too, is gone. The twins flit after him. The soldiers are coming closer, are almost on them with their guns. One bullet for each, no need to hurry.

Most of the people are too hungry, too tired and defeated to put up a fight. They just take it lying down. Cowards.

"What do we do?" Sue-Ellen asks.

Karen is going to die. She knows that. But damn it all to hell if she's not going to make it count for something. (She'll give Jim the chance to get Alex out of here. She'll give him the few seconds he needs to slip them through the backdoor and to freedom. She'll give him the veil of noise he needs to kill the single guard at the exit.

She'll give him everything she can because she just took the last of his innocence away from him.

Jim's one of the wolves now.)

She kisses Mickey, fierce and hard, like she did back when they were young and in love. She sends a prayer to whatever God is listening to protect Alex and Jim and to forgive her for what she did to that boy. Maybe she should have told him she loves him. That he's not broken, not a freak.

But she couldn't afford to. Unlike her sister, she'd do anything for her son.

And Sue-Ellen would do anything for her daughters. She takes the other woman's hand in hers, squeezing it. In this, they are comrades.

"We raise hell," she says.

o


	15. to that horizon

I have state exams in five weeks. Updates will be sporadic from now on. Sorry.

o

_Scotty loves her. That's that. Words: 900; Title: Pirates of the Caribbean_

o

**to that horizon**

o

The first time Monti (that's what people call him before Kirk takes one look at him and names him Scotty) lays eyes on the schematics of the new Enterprise is in his first year at the Academy.

(His instructors are still impressed as hell with his genius and his quick ways to think around what they thought to be beyond reproach. That changes after the Beagle Incident of course, after which they all wash his hands of him and pretend that they never salivated in the background while he, jumped-up kid half their age, rewrote all their theories for them.)

He presses the button to open the file and the lines and notes and numbers unfold before him like a flower blooming across the screen and he has ( quite possibly) never been this turned on in his life because look at that, just _look at that. _

There's a word for what he sees in the white on blues lines and that's beauty.

She's not even built yet, the enterprise, nothing more than an idea in the minds of people and a few heaps of metal in a shipyard somewhere at the butt-end of Iowa so far, but by Jove, she's the most beautiful thing Monti has ever seen and he knows, right then, right there, that he's going to sail on that ship. Doesn't matter who will get her nominally, who will fly her and where she'll go. He, Montgomery Scott, will be on that ship.

Bloody end of story.

o

Except, Admiral Archers prize beagle.

(Which, by the way, is found three years after its not so mysterious but definitely tragic disappearance, on a Starfleet transporter carrying foodstuffs to one of the colonies. It appears, so they story goes, out of mid-air and lands, smack dab on the Captain's lap, barking happily.)

And thus endeth the ballad of Monti and his beloved future ship and before you can say 'bullshit' he's stranded on Delta Vega with nothing and no-one but Keenser and the snow to keep him company and before long, he dreams of sandwiches instead of spacetravel.

Until the day when, you got it, the future Captain James T. Kirk and the literally _future _Ambassador Spock come breezing into his little hidey hole, calling him Scotty and telling him that space's the thing that moves.

Thirty minutes later he's almost drowning in the Enterprise's turbines and he's never felt this happy in his life.

o

She feels and sounds and moves exactly the way he imagined she would, smooth and fast, incredible power and speed tied together in metal and atoms, built by human hands. And he's the one in charge of her insides, her engines and organs.

The captain says where she'll go, but it's Scotty's hands and ideas that make it so and he reckons this is what God felt like when he flung the world into existence.

o

It hurts a wee bit, he'll admit that freely, when the Cap'n tells him to eject the warm engines because it's her hearts they're shooting into the black and that just isn't right.

(But he still suggests the possibility and he does it without question when given the order because he knows that if anyone loves the ship as much as Scotty does, it's Kirk.

They both hurt for her, but they also know that her crew is part of her and she'd never forgive them if they let anything happen to her kids.)

o

Afterwards, on Earth, Kirk stands at his door the very night he gets his official orders as the Enterprise's new captain. McCoy hovers over his shoulder, tired and obviously annoyed, but Kirk pays him little mind for once (usually the doc's the only one he's more attuned to than his ship), stepping past Scotty instead to look around the Spartan quarters.

Not like he had time to take anything with him from Delta Vega, what with the saving of the world being in process.

Scotty offers both men a seat and some scotch, mostly to soften the sour look on McCoy's face because frankly, the man's a mite bit scary.

"So then," he prompts as he sits down across from them.

Kirk straightens at the reminder and fumbles through his jeans (for a newly minted Starfleet Captain, he's rather unattached to his uniform, preferring to run around in civilian clothes, if only to avoid the rabid press) for a crumpled white envelope which he hands off to Scotty.

"What's that?" he asks as he hooks a finger under the flap and starts ripping it open.

"Orders," Kirk tells him curtly.

Orders. Chief engineer on board the Enterprise. Permanent, this time, not as a replacement for a man that died a horrible death out in the black.

"You'll accept," the Cap'n states. It's not a question. McCoy elbows him for being a rude ass, but Scotty just nods.

Of course he'll accept.

Him and that ship, they've been waiting for each other for far too long already.

o

(And out there, in space, during gamma shift, when everyone else sleeps and Scotty sits at his station with his eyes closed, she sings.

She sings a song of worlds and suns and endless travel inside her hull, safe and sound and damn him t' hell if it in'nt the prettiest thing he's ever heard.)

o


	16. you can go now

o

_Jo misses her Daddy. Words: 1350; Title: Poe_

o

**(it's okay) you can go now**

o

Jo is only five when her Daddy leaves and she doesn't really understand what's going on.

Oh, she knows that Ma and Daddy fight a lot and that there were all sorts of people who ask her questions and tell her what to do without really listening. They say she has to stay with Ma and that Daddy is going to leave.

But she doesn't understand _why. _

Her Daddy is the bestest man in the world and he loves her and hugs her and puts her to bed every night and always tells her a story and for some reason he's going now. Ma says it's because he has to. She says it's what's best for them.

(Jo doesn't understand what that means either.)

But she understands two things very well and she thinks that's probably all she really has to know. What she knows it this:

When he leaves, Daddy cries. Ma doesn't.

o

After Daddy's gone to a place called Star Feet, Jo is very, very sad. She misses him. So Miss Anna (who is her teacher and has really pretty blonde curls like Jo wants to have when she grows up) suggests that maybe Jo could write her Daddy letters to tell him how much she misses him and what she's doing and learning at school. She says that her Daddy was with Star Feet, too, and writing him letters always made her feel better.

So Jo writes letters. She draws pictures for Daddy, of all kinds of things, and she labels everything carefully because silly Daddy sometimes can't tell a dog from a bunny. When she doesn't know the letters, she makes Miss Anna or Ma label things for her. (Miss Anna never minds, but Ma doesn't look happy.)

Still, Jo hands her letters to Ma when they're done and Ma promises to send them to Daddy at Star Feet.

For weeks, Jo sits on the front porch every day after school, waiting for the mail man, who always gives her a sad headshake when he comes and says, "'M sorry, Missy, but I got nothin' fer ya."

Jo wonders if Daddy doesn't love her anymore and stops writing letters.

o

Only, Jo finds out a few months later, Daddy probably still loves her, but Ma is a mean, bad woman and she _doesn't _love Jo _or _Daddy.

She plays dress up one day and she needs earrings, so she sneaks into Ma's bedroom and digs through her drawers and finds all her letters that Ma said she sent to Daddy.

(Only she didn't and she lied about it and that's why she's mean and bad because Daddy always says, when you don't wanna tell, you don't tell, but you don't ever lie, Joanna McCoy, you hear me? And Jo hears and she never lies because lying is bad and Ma lied. She lied and let Jo think Daddy doesn't love her.)

She's so angry, she's crying and she grabs all the letters and stuffs them into her back pack and then she puts on her helmet and goes downstairs and tells Ma that she's a mean, bad woman and that she's going to Granny Jo now, because Granny Jo is not mean and she _never lies!_

Ma says she's not allowed to go but Jo ignores her and goes and she thinks that she sees Ma crying as she turns out of the drive, but she doesn't care.

o

Granny Jo is waiting for Jo (who is named after Granny Jo, by the way) when she arrives. She has iced tea for her to cool down and she sits Jo in her lap and tells her off for running away from Ma (very gently) and then she asks why Jo did it (which is what Daddy would do if he was here, but Ma never asks about things).

Jo takes off her backpack and shows the letters and she tells Granny Jo what Ma did and asks why she's so mean.

And Granny Jo says, "Do you sometimes get angry when you can't do something, sunshine?"

Jo thinks about it (because she _never _lies) and says, "Sometimes."

"And when you get angry, are you sometimes mean to other people even though they're not to blame?"

Jo thinks about that too, and remembers the other week when she tried to draw a horse and it didn't work and Janine said it was pretty and Jo told her to shut up, it wasn't and she figures that fits and nods.

Granny Jo smiles and hitches Jo higher on her lap, explaining, "See, your Ma, she's angry with herself and so she's angry with your Daddy. She didn't keep the letters to hurt you, sunshine, but to hurt your Daddy, because she's mad at him and herself."

Jo learns three things that afternoon. 1, grownups are weird and complicated, which is why, 2, she'll never grow up (even if that means she'll never get curls like Miss Anna). And 3, it's not called Star Feet, but Starfleet and it means that Daddy will get to fly into space one day.

Granny Jo promises that she'll send all of Jo's letters for her and that she'll keep Daddy's letters for Jo and they can read them together.

Jo tells Ma that from now on, she's having lunch at the McCoys' house every Friday and when Ma tries to say no, Jo screams at the top of her lungs for fifteen minutes until Ma gives in. Jo makes her pinky promise, just to be sure.

o

Daddy loves her and he always will. He tells her so in every letter he sends to Granny Jo's address (at least one per week, often two and always at least three or four pages long). He also tells her about what he does at work and about his friend Jim, who does lots of silly things. But he says that Jim makes him feel a bit less sad because he can't see Jo and after a few months, Jo decides to write a letter to Jim, too, and thank him for looking after Daddy.

Jim writes her back and she gets even more mail. (Jim's notes are short and they don't come as often as Daddy's but he tells Jo about the silly things Daddy does and he always promises to look after Daddy. He pinkie promises, too, without Jo having to ask. He's also the reason the Jo revises her opinion on growing up. She'll grow up and then she'll join Starfleet and be with Daddy and Jim all the time on their ship in space.)

For her birthday, she asks Jim if she can call him Uncle. He sends her a bouquet of red roses. (Daddy sends a letter that arrives at the same time and tells Jo that Jim is grinning like a loon, and what she did, please, thank you.)

She and Granny Jo giggle for days.

o

And then Daddy saves the world and Uncle Jim helps.

o

So does the pretty girl in the holovids, Daddy says, and the man with the funny ears ( "What, that green-blooded… erh, Vulcan, honey, he's a Vulcan…"). And lots of other people and when Ma sees the report she sort of falls into the sofa really hard and sits there staring for a long time while Jo talks with Daddy on the phone. (He sounds just like she remembers, only a bit tired and in the background, Uncle Jim promises to make sure Daddy sleeps and Daddy growls that he's not the one running on bravado and sheer damn stubbornness. Then he apologizes for cussing and Uncle Jim laughs.)

"Ma?" Jo asks later that night, "Can I go see Daddy?"

And Ma, who looks sort of sad, blinks at Jo very slowly and then shrugs, like she doesn't know. Quickly Jo adds, "Granny Jo will take me if I ask. I know she will."

"But-," Ma starts and then stops and nods says, "Okay."

o


	17. through the eyes of

o

_He doesn't understand why Kirk insists on playing dumb. Words: 1050; _

o

**through the eyes of**

o

Spock has long since gotten used to not understanding the quirks of his fellow crew members.

Nyota's belief in intangible constructs is among them (although he has to admit that, on occasion, he can comprehend that belief, if not feel it), as is Sulu's fondness of an outdated and ineffective weapon (even if that sword has saved the collective butts of the Away Team a time or two) and Doctor McCoy's stubborn claim to hate everyone when the whole crew knows he cares more than a CMO should (though Spock can see the use in that some days because the highly erratic behavior of the doctor causes his patients to obey his orders without protest. Unless said patient is a certain Starfleet captain. Then nothing short of a hypospray works.)

But the most puzzling of all these strange, illogical, human habits, is Kirk's insistence on pretending to be stupid.

Spock knows that he is not, in fact, that. Hacking the Kobayashi Maru was proof of that, and the scores and statistics Spock took a look at the night before Nero reappeared after twenty-five years confirmed that. In fact, the man is a certified genius.

Kirk is one of the few people aboard that can follow Chekov and Scotty when they go off on technical tangents about space travel, beaming and the funny noise the engines are making again.

Spock has also, through observation, found out that the captain speaks Andorian (he laughed at a joke he was not supposed to understand), a few chunks of Orion (he grew deathly still and angry when an Orion offered a lot of money for Ensign Chekov), and Vulcan (he smirked at Spock for an entire week after he and Nyota had a little disagreement in his native language).

And yet Kirk insists on letting the communications lieutenant do all the speaking for him, rolls his eyes when his navigator uses words with more than three syllables and generally covers every outburst of genius with a broad smile and a quick tongue, as if it is something to be ashamed of.

For months he tries to figure out the why and what for, but the more he sees, the more he gets confused and Spock has a genetic predisposition to dislike confusion of all kinds.

In the end he sees only one way to solve the walking, joking riddle that is James T. Kirk and that is by simply asking the object of his study.

"Captain? A question, if I may."

Kirk shrugs and nods, managing to sprawl on the hard bench of the canteen.

"Why do you insist on pretending to be of lesser intelligence than you are?"

He laughs. "You know, no-one's ever phrased is quite like that."

Spock raises one eyebrow. "People have asked this question before?"

"Sure. Bones. Uhura, surprisingly. A few teachers who thought they'd turn me around and make me a geek with glasses and suspenders."

The first officer is unsure what suspenders have to do with a person's IQ, but he has been told that humans associate glasses with intelligence. He refrains from asking for an explanation though, because he is well aware of what the captain is trying to do.

"You are avoiding my question."

"Me?" Kirk asks, pointing at himself with one digit. "Never."

He is lying and not making a secret out of it. It is not means as an insult, a lie like that, Spock has learned in the past months, but simply a way of saying, without words, that the subject is uncomfortable for Kirk. He decides to, as they say, pull out the big guns.

"Jim," he starts and the other man sits up a bit straighter, unused to his name from his first officer's lips. "Please. I am trying to understand, but I find my information insufficient."

For the longest time Kirk is silent, looking around them at the few scattered crew members seated at a discrete distance around them, enjoying the quiet of early gamma shift. Then he sighs, runs a hand through his already ruffled hair and asks rhetorically, "How did I get settled with the job of being your human nature coach?"

Another moment of silence. Then, "It's an advantage, you know? Make people underestimate you and they'll never expect it when you beat them. Tactical."

That is true, but, "I do not believe that is truly your reason for hiding your intellect."

"Sharp little tool, aren't you?" The captain seems mildly annoyed, but not disinclined to explain. Spock holds still and patiently waits.

He is rewarded. "Do you know who I am?"

His eyebrows rise of their own volition. "You are Captain James Tiberius Kirk."

The laugh his answer gains him is hollow. "Nope. I am George Kirk's son. I am Winona Kirk's son. I am Sam's little brother. I am…"

He trails off, apparently out of words. Spock tries to aid his captain. "You are defined by your familiar relations to others."

"Yeah," Kirk waves a negligent hand. "That. Everyone always expected me to be like my father, like my mother, like whoever and whatever. They expected me to be great. So I showed them."

"By pricing yourself below value."

"Was that a metaphor?" Kirk grins proudly. Spock simply waits for the moment to pass. Eventually, the captain admits, "Yes."

"That seems counterproductive."

"Yes," Jim repeats and stands, rapping his knuckles on the table top once before turning on his heel and quietly leaving the room without saying goodbye.

Spock is left with two trays of half eaten food and more confusion, more questions than before because James Kirk is smart, incredibly smart, but he still does the dumbest things in order to escape the ghost of a man that is twenty-five years dead and has long since fallen behind him in their imaginary race for fame and glory. He knows the contradiction in his own actions but he does not change them.

He knows that he is a great man, but hides behind an empty smile and an easy swagger, pretending not to care and not to know.

Studying his hands on the table top, Spock decides, for the first time in his life, to let a riddle go.

o


	18. you survived

What the hell kinda problem does the Pit have with scene breaks? What? I might go back and fix them if I ever get bored. Till then, sorry.

For Pax, who made me art and is generally seven and a half shades of awesome.

o

_You only turn eighteen once. Words: 1200; Title: Amazingly bad birthday song?_

o

**you survived (another year)**

o

"You only turn eighteen once," Kirk tells Chekov as he reels him in with an arm across his shoulders and a wicked grin.

"Yes, sir," Pavel agrees, mostly because he knows that glint in his captain's eye and he knows it does not bode well for anyone's sanity.

"You should celebrate." (Of course. Kirk thinks losing in a fist fight is a reason to celebrate.)

"I have the early shift tomorrow, Captain," he weakly defends himself, trying to unobtrusively slip out from under his superior's strong hold.

Impossibly, Kirk's grin grows. "Not any-mo-ore," he sing-songs and lets his arm slide down Pavel's back and around until he can grab the Ensign's hand to drag him toward the shuttle bay.

Pavel really should have known better than to believe they were docked on a pleasure planet on his birthday by accident.

o

Pavel figures he should be grateful for small miracles because (against all expectation) Kirk did not, in fact, organize a surprise birthday bash to end all surprise birthday bashes. It's him and the captain and McCoy (because where Kirk is, McCoy is, always, forever, and they all know that).

Sulu is still laid out in the medbay from Kirk's last pseudo suicide trip to a new planet, but has apparently given the two older men strict orders to go and make Chekov get dead drunk. The rest of the bridge crew already delivered their well-wishes and gave him their presents.

On the one hand, that is good because Pavel hates crowds, especially when he has to be at their center. On the other hand, it fills him with a quiet sort of dread because under the captain's easy smile is a hard kind of determination that does not bode well for all around him.

He leaves the doctor and his navigator at a table and hits the bar, coming back with a tray full of shots, grinning widely.

"Captain," Chekov tries and is ignored as a heavy arm drapes over his shoulders yet again and a glass is pushed in his direction.

"Drink up, Ensign," Kirk orders, "We're taking you booze-virginity today."

"But – "

"No buts. You are the last member of the crew to turn eighteen and we need to get you up to speed."

Pavel looks to McCoy for help, but the doctor only raises one eyebrow. He drinks.

"There's a boy."

o

Dance.

They make him dance.

Or rather, Kirk makes him dance, one hand around his waist, the other locked with his, hopping and swaying and twisting and Pavel understands the allure of the man close up. He's probably the most alive person anyone can ever meet. (Especially a pale boy from the Russian countryside where even summer seems cold and barren.)

Pavel doesn't know where to put his limbs, has no idea what he does, but Kirk sweeps him away, makes him move and float and forget that he has feet of clay and numbers. He giggles into his captain's shoulder helplessly, feeling limber and reckless and says in a breathy voice, "This is fun."

"Now you're getting it!"

o

By midnight, he's tired but elated, tipsy and sweaty from all the dancing. He tries to escape to the table but McCoy is there with a stern look and a pointed finger. Back to the dance floor, that finger says, without saying a word.

Then the captain is there, limbs like vines, and Pavel has no choice but to go.

o

By two, he can barely stand, tired only now, buzz fading and limbs heavy. And again Kirk is there, with more shots and more smiles and more dancing and on they go because you only turn eighteen once and they have orders from Sulu anyway, so there.

(Pavel silently calculates the odds of his managing to sneak up on the martial artist to smack him silly for doing this but stops halfway through the equation, distracted by something called nu-quila and doesn't quite manage to get back on it. It's probably a good thing.)

o

By four, the captain sings and the doctor hangs in his chair, obviously half asleep, but refusing to give up. The two of them (Checkov and McCoy) watch Kirk flit away for yet another round of refills, although he did acquiesce to bringing what passes for coffee on this planet. They have to stay awake somehow.

"Why is he…?" Pavel starts to ask, but finds no suitable way to phrase 'more crazy than usual' without risking a court martial.

McCoy grunts and when Kirk returns, he pulls the captain into his lap and manages to keep him there for almost fifteen minutes.

o

False dawn hits half an hour later and they get kicked out of the last bar and slowly, meanderingly, teeter back towards the docks, weak light enough to make their eyes water. McCoy and Kirk cling to each other like they usually do after a night out drinking, but Kirk has plastered Pavel to his side and refuses to let him go (yet again), so the three of them sway dangerously and keep stepping on each others' feet.

It looks more graceful when it's just the two of them, doctor and captain dancing their impossible dance of two around each other like planets inside each others' gravitational pull.

o

The ship is well in sight when Pavel realizes that he just spent the entire night out dancing and drinking and he feels like he got run over twice and then left for dead but there's also that ball of warmth in his stomach, that curling thing that lets him know he'll feel like hell later today and not regret it.

"Thank you," he says quietly and the doctor rolls his eyes, grunts and huffs as he usually does.

The captain pulls Pavel impossibly closer still and says, "Had to. It's a duty. On your eighteenth birthday, someone takes you out to get absolutely shit faced. As your captain, that duty fell to me."

(It's kind of amazing how eloquent Kirk gets when he's close to keeling over from being so hammered.)

Chekov grins boyishly and asks, "Who took you out then, Captain?"

"And here we are!" Kirk suddenly calls directly in his ear, "Home sweet home," he grins up at the bulk of the Enterprise above them, smacks his navigator on the back hard enough to send him stumbling and then drags his CMO toward the shuttle waiting for them.

Pavel manages to regain his balance (although it's a close thing and he will have to figure out exactly how alcohol influences his systems) and blinks after his two superior officers stupidly, wondering what just happened.

o

(Later, after he pukes his guts out and is lying next to Sulu in the madbay, grinning weakly, he asks McCoy. The older man turns bloodshot eyes on him and shakes his head, saying, "I don't think you wanna know where Jim spent his eighteenth, kid."

Then he leaves and Sulu wakes to ask how his night out was and Pavel smiles and tells him, "Amazing," because it was.)

o


	19. can you see

o

_Winona walks on. Words: 1100; Title: Perversion of a Stone Temple Pilots song_

o

**can you see (without lies)**

o

After the Narada falls, Winona Kirk is among the last to be called back to active duty. She knows that Starfleet needs every pair of hands it can get at the moment, and she has a very good pair of hands (graceful and smooth, even after thirty years of machines and engines. Her son has the same hands.) so she isn't quite sure why her call comes weeks after all others.

Except, she is.

Her son saved the world and she can take no credit for that.

Her son saved the world and it is not her that groomed him for it, groomed him for avenging his long dead father. Jim raised himself and all she ever did was watch him break.

o

She remembers the look on his face when the shuttle brought him back to her after Tarsus IV. He looked like a dead boy with blue, blue eyes, wide as the sky she loved so much, and just as empty.

She still has a message from her sister saved away in the far corners of some random PADD. A message that says, _Oh, Win, what have you done to that boy? He's like an animal._

(A wolf, Winona thinks when she looks into those endless eyes and sees only her own, tired face reflected back at her. Jim is a wolf now.)

He stopped calling her Mom that day.

o

The day after the call she puts on her uniform, braids her hair tightly in the way that always turned George on and packs a bag. There is a world to rebuild and she has no time to wallow.

They give her an office and a stack of paperwork usually split among four officers of lower rank and she throws herself into it because work is better than staring at the news reels all day and seeing her dead husband with her son's razor smile.

o

People look at her funny. In the hallways, during lunch, at meetings. Slanted, hooded looks, secret whispers following in her wake. (Mother, they say, her son… Kirk, the one who… you know, she never… didn't even know…)

She wants to ask how they know, wants to ask who told them about her and Jim and everything that never was between them. But Jim is a hero and there are files to be dug up before they can be buried. Criminal and school records, stories from all and sundry back in Iowa and her name is never mentioned. It's Jim and that car, Jim and his step father, Jim and everything with a pulse, Jim and that bar. Jim and the county sheriff he was on a first name basis with. Never Winona who bailed him out, never Winona who stood by him. Not even Winona who waited for him at home.

Never Winona.

(Because she was up in the black, chasing her husband's atoms and ghost, chasing everything she lost when he gave his life for his son, a son he didn't even know, a son she never could look at without wishing there was someone else in his place.)

Whenever she makes out those whispers, a bad taste rises in her mouth, like ashes and stale water.

(That taste is guilt, but she never names it, even in her head.)

o

There are problems with the new warp core the Enterprise is supposed to get. Something about the wiring doesn't match, circuits keep frying on practice runs. It's her area of expertise and they ask her to assist the newly minted Head of Engineering, Scott something or other.

The pimply cadet who delivers the message looks at her in a way that says he expects her to back down with her tail between her legs and run. She sneers at him, haughty and cold, the Ice Queen she never really was before George and he leaves with new gossip but no victory.

She packs her tools and papers and files, gets on the next shuttle and finds herself on the station, Earth a ball of blue and grey beneath her and the black all around her. Immediately, she breathes easier. Somehow, whenever her feet leave the dirt, she imagines she can smell George's aftershave.

o

They lead her toward the dock the 'Fleet's joy and pride is tethered to, give her temporary access codes and tell her where to find the captain.

The captain.

(She can do this, as long as she thinks of the man as only that. The captain. Not her son. Not the last proof of her and her dead husband's love. Not the object of her indifference. Not her greatest failure. Just. The captain.)

Her steps are sure but slow, her head high, but her eyes blind. She walks and doesn't remember how she does it, breathes and tastes only the stale, recycled air of a space station and nothing of the freedom she felt a moment before.

She walks.

(Toward her execution.)

o

She hears Jim before she sees him.

Or rather, she hears his laughter. It's rich and deep, full of something wild and beautiful, booming, loud and still soft. It's joyful instead of boasting and it's real and startled and probably not something that happens often.

She is surprised to find that Jim's laugh is nothing like his father's.

Then she rounds the last bend and there he is. (His hair is darker than on the news, his eyes bluer and his jaw line harder and there is a presence about him that fills the room to capacity, like giant wings furled around him, filling space that no one man should be able to fill. He is, she realizes, far more impressive than George ever was.)

It hurts.

He slaps a dark haired man on the shoulder with a happy grin and says, "Aw, come on, Bones, you know you love me."

"Kid," the man returns, words nasty and voice soft, wrapping around his vowels, "I got no idea why I put up with you half the time."

Jim chuckles and moves his hand across a strong neck to the opposite shoulder, pulling the older man into a casual hug that looks… content.

She didn't know her son could look that way.

o

Two days later a message from that Scott person finds its way into her office, telling her that she does not need to come aboard after all, they have figured out the problem. The cadet who delivers it is the same as before and there is triumph lurking in his eyes.

(And why not? She's the coward he and the rest of Starfleet expected her to be.)

The next day she asks for a transfer to a ship, any ship and her request it granted, posthaste.

o


	20. just to feel alive

.

_Uhura and Sulu. Drunk. It's not as funny as it sounds. Words: 660 ; Title: Smile Empty Soul_

_._

**(i do it for the drugs, i do it) just to feel alive**

_._

Uhura takes Sulu out drinking on the one year anniversary of the day that started (and ended) all their lives.

She takes him because Spock doesn't get drunk, Chekov works through his own grief by babbling incessantly and Scott is too drunk to get drunk. McCoy is the only really acceptable drinking partner for gloomy occasions but the man is wrapped around Kirk's finger at least half a dozen times. (With a bow at the end.)

Usually she'd mock him mercilessly for it, but these past few days Kirk has been constantly looking like some body-jumping alien possessed him and made him kill his own puppy and even though Uhura does not now, nor will she ever, feel anything besides grudging respect for Kirk (she tells herself that so she sleeps better at night), she can't stand that look on his face. Since McCoy makes it go away, she's not been ribbing him this week.

So she takes Sulu, who talks at the right moments and shuts up, too, and oh, do they drink. (They're on some random planet and there are these fuzzy cocktails in radioactive-waste-green that taste de-licious and Nyota thinks that she should, maybe, stop drinking them now.)

"You know," she says eventually, between her fifth and twelfth cocktail, "I think everything that could go wrong, did."

She doesn't have to tell the pilot what she's talking about. He was there. He knows. He shrugs. "It could have gone a lot worse."

She knows, without asking, that he's thinking of the platform and how he fell, how Kirk saved his life. It's his favorite story about the captain, even if the memory still makes him go green around the edges. Still, he's right. It could have gone worse. Spock (bless his stubborn logical mind) could have gotten his will and taken them to regroup. They would have lost Pike and a little place called planet Earth right after that. (She loves her Vulcan but that really wasn't one of his better plans.)

She nods and Sulu nods back and grunts and gets up to buy the next round. She lays her head on her folded arms and closes her eyes. (In the morning she'll be terribly embarrassed about everything she will be able to remember about tonight, but sometimes even the most determined person needs to let go and lay her head down on a table in a futuristic bar that sells green cocktails.)

Sulu comes back, puts her drink in front of her and says nothing until she asks, "Why do we do this?"

(Fly with Kirk. Risk our lives for him. Love him. Accept idiotic mission after idiotic mission. Put our hearts on the line every time? Care so much? Never give up?)

"New worlds?" the pilot suggests with a shrug saying he doesn't really know.

"New languages," she adds, sounding no more sure.

"Danger," Sulu adds, sounding steadier.

"Death," she tags on, reaching for her glass.

"Pain."

"Boredom."

They both look at each other and solemnly qualify, "Kirk's."

They grin. It's an on-going joke on the ship that no hostile alien race could ever be as dangerous as a bored James T. Kirk. Uhura giggles, sloshing her drink over her hand.

"I think we do it because we have to," Sulu says thoughtfully, tapping his short nails against the shiny table-top.

"But _why_?"

He shrugs and throws back his drink, shaking himself like a dog at the aftertaste. "Because that's what family does."

He says it so simply, so sure. Like anyone should know that. Nyota rests her head on her arms again and screws her eyes shut, scrunching up her nose. She wants to cry. Sulu reaches over and plucks her glass out of her left hand before petting her hair for a moment. She growls half-heartedly as he digs for his comm unit.

Time to go home.

.


	21. searching

.

_It's Jim's birthday. Words: 1200 ; Title: CocoRosie_

.

**searching (for my father's power)**

.

During their first year at the Academy, Bones figures out that Jim has never celebrated his birthday. Not once. Ever. Bones doesn't give a shit about his own birthday, personally, but he's got a kid who glows weeks before the actual event and to take that from a child is a crime. (It's not the first strike against Winona Kirk in Bones's book, but it's one of the biggest.)

So Bones checks (hacks into) Jim's files, which are all so secret, not even his doctor gets to see everything, hence the hacking, and finds out the exact time James Tiberius Kirk was born. And then he makes Jim a deal. He gets to mope about the loss of the one parent that might have been any good until that exact minute.

After that, they celebrate. (Celebration in this case meaning: get drunk as skunks and forget what exactly it is they are celebrating in the first place). Any gift Bones gives Jim usually has to wait until the next day, when the hangover has become manageable.

It's a fine system, that. And it works.

Right up until the bridge crew comes up to Bones and asks him where they should have the captain's birthday party.

Party?

.

He tries to stop them once, twice and then once again and gets kicked in the shin by Uhura of all people, who explains, very calmly, that she knows exactly what Kirk's birthday marks and that she also knows about Bones's deal with the captain and they are getting in on it, because he's their captain and the captain's birthday is as close as the crew of a spaceship gets to an official holiday these days.

He lets her get away with the excuse and takes the job of distracting Jim because that way, at least, he can pretend ignorance, thanks a lot.

.

They start in on the booze early, but they're still only halfway through the first bottle of booze when Jim leans against Bones's shoulder, rolling his eyes up until he's looking at the doctor upside down. "They're planning a surprise party, aren't they?"

He barely slurs his words. Bones nods solemnly and confesses, "I'm the distraction."

Predictably, Jim's grin turns lewd. "Distract me then, Doctor," he demands, pressing a sloppy kiss to the shoulder he's leaning against.

Bones wraps his arm around his shoulders, draws him in, draws him close. (As close as he can ever get Jim without surgically sewing himself into the captain's skin. As close as Jim ever lets him, which is closer than anyone else and still, some days, as far away as the distance between stars.)

He pulls him close and whispers secrets into his skin, secrets like 'I'm sorry', 'I know you miss him', 'it's okay to hate him'. And: 'I won't leave'.

All of those things, too quietly spoken to hear, until the clock ticks over that one minute and Jim gathers himself like a ragdoll, pulling all his pieces back inside and putting his grin back on. He rolls out of bed and jumps into his pants, tugging on Bones's hand. "Come on, Bones," he demands, smiling too widely, "Time for my surprise party!"

The good doctor rolls over in bed and thinks that this is not how things are supposed to go. He thinks that parents are supposed to live for their kids, not die for them.

(He thinks of his little girl and misses her so badly his teeth ache.)

.

The room is dark as they enter it and Bones is glad that Jim knows about the surprise, because otherwise, he'd been shooting when the lights suddenly flare and the entire bridge crew jumps out of the shadows, yelling, "Happy Birthday!"

Someone put a party hat on Spock. Bones has to bite back laughter and hangs at Jim's shoulder as the man hugs everyone and lets himself be slapped on the back. His smile is bright and fixed, the smile that looks so very brilliant until you get a real one, until you realize that Jim's bright smiles are like the lights they shine in your face during an interrogation. A distraction that makes it impossible to see what lies beyond.

Uhura finds Bones eventually, pulling him away from the adoring crowd that keeps swelling and dwindling as other members of the crew come and go. "Is he happy?" she asks and Bones is surprised.

He didn't know the woman knew Jim well enough to tell something was wrong. He shrugs anyway and nods. "Sure. He loves being the center of attention."

Uhura snorts derisively, in the way he knows by now, is reserved for when she wants to laugh but has to pretend to be tough. "That he does," she agrees, easily. Bones has no idea if she's lying or not and before he can ask, she is lost in the crowd again.

The captain is the next person to find him, leaning against a wall, watching. "Hey, Bones," he drawls, almost slurring. Too much booze. "Whatcha doing all the way over here?"

(Usually, Bones would say something biting. Something about how he fled from the adoring masses and Jim's grabby hands. Today is not usually.) He says, "Just watching, kid."

And Jim's bright smile is back, all teeth and nothing behind it and he slinks a step closer, closing a distance that isn't really there in the first place and Bones thinks that maybe Jim wants to sew himself into Bones the same way Bones wants to sew himself into Jim. (Closer, closer, closer).

"Watching me?" the captain asks and it's all sex and seduction and Bones finds himself wondering what Jim might have been like. If George had lived. If Winona hadn't abandoned him to his stepfather's tender mercies. If he hadn't had to raise himself and fight so much and be so hard. If someone had loved him before Bones threatened to puke on him in that shuttle.

(He wonders if this Jim is every Jim, or of there is an unhurt, undamaged version out there, somewhere. A version whose smiles are dimmer, but more real. )

He wonders if there is a Jim whose birthday is not a nauseating mixture of grief, hate, despair, loneliness and rancid, defiant joy.

"Always," he agrees with the captain, tugs him another inch closer. Jim tries to kiss him and he turns his head away, refuses the advance and wraps his arms around Jim's shoulders and hip instead. Holds him close. (Holds him together.)

To his surprise, Jim lets him.

When they see the other Spock the next time, Bones will ask him about the other Jim, his Jim. He'll ask about what he was like, ask if he had the same razor blade edges and the same floodlight smile. He'll ask if the other Jim celebrated his birthday.

He will.

(That's a lie.)

.

("You alright?" he asks eventually, redundantly, while he's pouring Jim into his bed later, so much later.

Jim laughs a bit into his shoulder and then nods. "Yeah.")

.


End file.
